


Front Offices

by americanleaguer



Category: Baseball RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-19
Updated: 2010-10-19
Packaged: 2017-10-12 18:56:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/americanleaguer/pseuds/americanleaguer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The original LJ post with comments can be <a href="http://americanleaguer.livejournal.com/38116.html">found here</a>.  There have been some minor alterations made to this version, mostly in terms of formatting, spelling, and grammar.  There have been no major changes made.</p><p><b>Disclaimer, again:</b>  This is a work of <b>fiction</b>.  It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions.  It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured.  No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story:  it is solely for entertainment.  And again, it is entirely <b>fictional</b>, i.e. <b>not true</b>.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Front Offices

**Author's Note:**

> The original LJ post with comments can be [found here](http://americanleaguer.livejournal.com/38116.html). There have been some minor alterations made to this version, mostly in terms of formatting, spelling, and grammar. There have been no major changes made.
> 
>  **Disclaimer, again:** This is a work of **fiction**. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely **fictional** , i.e. **not true**.

> **1989:** Billy Beane resigns from his professional baseball career after playing in parts of 6 seasons.
> 
>  **1995:** Theo Epstein graduates from Yale University with a degree in American Studies.
> 
>  **June 1996:** Eric Chavez is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland Athletics.
> 
>  **1997:** Billy Beane is hired as the general manager of the Oakland A's. Tim Hudson is selected in the 6th round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A's.
> 
>  **June 1998:** Mark Mulder is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A's.
> 
>  **1999:** After studying at the San Diego School of Law, Theo Epstein passes the California bar exam. During this time he also works in the PR department of the San Diego Padres under Larry Lucchino, eventually becoming Director of Baseball Operations. Barry Zito is selected in the first round of the amateur draft by the Oakland A's.
> 
>  **December 19, 2000:** The Boston Red Sox sign free agent Manny Ramirez.
> 
>  **Early 2002:** John Henry, Larry Lucchino, and Tom Werner purchase the Boston Red Sox-- Henry as the principal owner, Werner as the chairman, Lucchino as the President and CEO.
> 
>  **November 2002:** Theo Epstein is hired, primarily due to the influence of Larry Lucchino, as the general manager of the Boston Red Sox.

 

The best thing about Billy Beane, so far as Theo is concerned, is his brain. It's a source of constant marvel. Not that there aren't intelligent people around for Theo to talk to; there are, lots of them. Hell, he goes out of his way to hire them. But when it comes to other general managers, other people at his level of responsibility, Billy is the only one he's run across who is _this_ smart.

Of course that doesn't mean that there aren't other smart GMs. Most GMs are smart, much more so than owners or regular managers, _worlds_ smarter than the ballplayers themselves, but none of them are smart in the same way that Billy is. Billy's version of smart is a kind of roving all-consuming intelligence that aims its sharp swordpoint at one topic after another, attacking with single-minded intensity until the appropriate information has been completely eviscerated.

Theo always knew that he would be able to talk to Billy about baseball. He's read the book, after all. But the first time Billy spent three hours talking with him about classic film history-- something Theo knows far too much about, his grandfather and great-uncle having written Casablanca, his father having run the English department at BU-- Theo realized that Billy was going to be a lot more fun than most other GMs.

And Theo has never been the kind of GM who objects to fun.

\----

Theo considers tapeball to be one of his crowning achievements. It is, so far as he knows, unique to the Fenway front offices, although maybe Josh and Peter have taught it to the Arizona guys now that they've gone over there. Tapeball is the result of a very young front office with lots of extra energy, run by a very young general manager with a strong mischievous streak.

It's pretty simple. You wad up masking tape until you have something about the size and shape of a baseball, you get a bunch of people together in the hallway or in a conference room, and you throw the ball around and whack it with a fungo or something. Tapeball is played whenever Theo gets so bored that he can't work (usually around 10 or 11 at night), sticks his head out of his office, and yells, "Tapeball!"

So far tapeball has resulted in the destruction of three framed pictures, four coffee mugs, a dozen carefully organized piles of paper, and one broken finger. The office manager, a solid woman in her late 50s hired for her capability and sense of organization, screams at them whenever she hears them playing it. Theo hired her himself, but this has never yet stopped her from chewing him out for tapeball, and it has never stopped Theo from feeling thoroughly chastened when she does. So they wait until she leaves the office, sneaking around like little kids with wiffle ball bats and wads of tape hidden behind their backs.

Theo tiptoes past her desk, quiet as he can so she has no reason to look up. He's holding a tapeball in his hand, keeping it at his hip, on the side facing away from her.

A young woman looks up from her desk as he passes. She's a new hire, only been here a week or two, but she's good with numbers and is writing a new program that will crunch VORP statistics-- Value Over Replacement Player-- much faster and, hopefully, more accurately than anything they've been using thus far. It will improve the risk management of the team significantly if it works. Smart, young computer geeks: these are kinds of people that Theo likes to hire.

Lots of GMs think he's crazy for this. For hiring more young people than old baseball men. For hiring more _women_ than old baseball men. But Theo doesn't care, has never cared. He's going to run his team the best way he can, so that it wins the most it can, and makes the most money it can at the same time while maximizing the money put in, and to do that he doesn't want old baseball men. He wants, often, just the opposite. He knows this well. It's a lesson he learned from someone who knows it better than anyone else.

The young woman sees the tapeball in his hand and giggles, bringing a hand quickly up to her mouth to stifle it so that the office manager doesn't hear. Theo favors her with a quick grin, the kind he's best at. She grins back and looks back down at her computer screen. Her fingers fly over the keyboard so that it clicks and clacks like mechanical birdsong.

Young, technologically adept, with a mindset that allows for things like tapeball. This is how Theo runs his office, and no matter how many old baseball men tell him he's crazy, he just needs that one vote of confidence, that one opinion he trusts, to know that he's doing it exactly right.

\----

He wasn't originally supposed to be in charge, not in Boston. He was Larry Lucchino's geeky pet law student Director of Baseball Operations, formerly an even geekier college intern for the Orioles who stayed up all night getting the late west coast scores, writing baseball stories for the _Yale Daily News_.

When the new Boston ownership took over, they wanted a fresh approach below them; the team and the franchise had both suffered too much stagnation for too long. Theo was a ridiculous choice, though. He was barely grown-up, not just someone who had Never Played Baseball, but also someone who was Younger Than Most of the Team. One of these factors alone should have been enough to keep him far away from the job. Both together should have made it impossible for him to ever acquire it.

In fact, the first name on the list of the new Boston front office _wasn't_ Theo Epstein, although he secretly suspects that Lucchino was pushing for him right from the very beginning. No, the new front office was comprised of men who had read all the right articles, who had seen quite a few baseball things themselves and who had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted. What they wanted was Billy Beane.

Of course Theo's heard all the stories by now. The official one, the one in the book, says that Billy debated and debated and said yes but at the very last possible second said no, because he didn't want to give up on something he'd started, and also so that he could be close to his family.

The unofficial story, the one _not_ in the book, says that Billy debated and debated and said yes but at the very last possible second said no, setting off a very hushed-up legal battle over whether or not Billy had violated a contract by backing out so last-minute. The unofficial story also says that Billy was less concerned with not seeing his family and more concerned with seeing too much of certain people who were not his family, but who maybe had more claim to him in that way, and whose claim would grow the more Billy was away from his wife and his little girl. There were also whispers of something approaching alcohol abuse, but that attracted less attention, in baseball.

The _unofficial_ unofficial story whispers something about those people Billy had to avoid being not prostitutes, or groupies, or kids looking a little too much like him about the eyes. The unofficial unofficial story whispers about attachments rather more male in nature.

Official or unofficial story, it's Theo who gets the call eventually, and now it doesn't seem like Billy could ever be anywhere _but_ Oakland.

Theo thinks that Billy must have, on some level, regretted not taking the Boston job. He might think this on his own, just from the stories, but he thinks it more especially because as soon as he took the job Billy started calling him at his office. Billy wanted to talk trades, and prospects, and the state of umpiring in baseball today, and statistics, and economics, and, after a while, real life.

At first Theo isn't sure why Billy would call him so often; a month after Theo took the Boston job, Billy is calling once every two or three days and Theo has his office phone number, his home phone number, and both his cell phone numbers. It's not that he objects, because Billy Beane is a legend to a certain class of baseball people, and Theo is one of those people. It's just that he'd heard that Billy was not the most friendly or forthcoming guy in the world.

The only thing he can think of is that Billy wants something from him, and is, for strange Billy-ish reasons of his own, trying to work Theo from a personal angle. This seems so wildly improbable that he has to ultimately reject it, though. Billy will do a lot of things to get a trade done, but going out of his way to befriend someone is a little much, even for him.

Anyways, they _do_ talk trades-- Billy keeps obliquely asking about Kevin Youkilis and acting like it's no big deal, which tells Theo that he had better hold onto Youkilis as hard as he can if he knows what's good for his team-- but Billy doesn't press the issue in a dead-serious-need-this-trade way.

It's sometimes almost as though the whole Kevin Youkilis thing, the whole Greek God of Walks story, everything else alongside that, it's just an excuse for Billy to call Theo up whenever the fancy strikes him. This seems improbable too, but Theo, phone cradled bemusedly to his head in his office after hours, can't come up with anything better.

>  **2003:** Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is published and released.
> 
>  **January 22, 2003:** The Boston Red Sox sign free agent David Ortiz following his unconditional release from the Minnesota Twins.
> 
>  **2004:** The Oakland A's sign Eric Chavez to a 6 year, $66 million contract extension.

General manager of the Boston Red Sox. It still hasn't quite sunk in. He goes up to his executive suite ( _his_ executive suite!) when the ballpark is empty and stares past sheet glass windows to the Green Monster. He remembers, as a little kid, coming to Fenway and gazing in awe at that _very same wall_ , and although it didn't have seats on top of it when he was growing up, its very greenness and monstrosity were two adjectival constants in his young life, just the same today.

He can see the Citgo sign peeking over the Monster, and it makes him smile. That's been around for a while too.

It's the same for children all over New England, and for a lot of adults. This is a big responsibility. Staring at the white scoreboard scribed on the classically drab green, Theo is not likely to forget it.

>  **July 31, 2004:** The Boston Red Sox trade Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that nets them Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz.
> 
>  **October 27, 2004:** The Boston Red Sox win the World Series for the first time since 1918.
> 
>  **December 10-13, 2004:** The 2004 Winter Meetings meet in Anaheim, CA.

"So," Billy says, voice a little staticky, "freeing up roster space any time soon?" The phone crackles on his end and there's some faint garbled radio-voice-noise. Theo glances at the clock. Eleven pm in his office means 8 pm in Billy's office, but Billy doesn't sound like he's in his office. This probably means that Billy is in his car, driving around and around the city so that he doesn't go crazy pacing around the stadium or his house or wherever it is that he's actually supposed to be.

"You're a fucking shark, Billy."

"Mmmm. A shark." There's a pause, during which Theo can imagine Billy concentrating on getting his car around a sharp turn, phone clamped tight between his ear and his shoulder. "Why would you say that? You bleeding?" It's late 2004 and Billy obviously has something on his mind.

"Not yet." Theo is thinking about the potential deal he's trying to work out with Edgar Renteria. Tony LaRussa had been saying some unflattering things about Edgar's fortitude, and Theo has spent most of the day reassuring everyone in Boston that Edgar will be fine. He's not entirely sure of this himself, but if he says it enough times he's hoping that he'll get there.

"Yeah? Managing a post-Series team treating you good?"

Theo laughs. "It's not that different from managing any other kinda team in the offseason. Just with more publicity stunts."

"Publicity stunts." The disgust in Billy's voice is evident. "Poor fucker."

"I'll live."

"You seem to have the knack for it." Billy is working up to whatever it is he really wants to say. Theo can feel it coming.

"Last I checked you were alive too, Billy. I'd say that means you have just as much a knack for living."

"You know what I mean. Living through the crazy shit you do."

Theo pauses. This is a weird kind of statement, even from Billy, who is in the habit of routinely making what other people might call weird statements. It's not like Theo's a daredevil mountain climber or a sky diver or something; he's not in the habit of doing crazy things that it would be hard to survive. Unless, of course, Billy is talking _careers_ , in which case...

"You mean Nomar?"

"I always mean Nomar."

It seems like ever since Theo has known Billy, Billy has been obsessed with two Red Sox: Kevin Youkilis and Nomar Garciaparra. He's obsessed with Youkilis because Youkilis represents _precisely_ the kind of undervalued yet incredibly effective player that Billy craves, the kind of player who's so cheap but gets on base so often. Theo would in a second believe that Billy has actual honest-to-god dreams about acquiring Youkilis.

Nomar is something else entirely. Billy is not so obsessed with Nomar as a player (too expensive, not enough production for the dollar), but he is _very_ obsessed with Nomar as icon-that-Theo-traded-in-the-middle-of-a-season. In this sense he's not really obsessed with Nomar himself, just with the kind of balls it must have taken for Theo to pull off that move. He does talk about Nomar a lot, though.

"I survived Nomar, yes." Theo says this with a wry smile, which he hopes comes through across phone and state and time zone lines, although he never can tell. He thinks he can hear when Billy makes faces over the phone, though, so he doesn't feel too weird about it.

"Yeah. Hang on, I'm gonna park." There's a squeal of tires and Theo winces sympathetically, imagining Billy jerking the car across a lane of traffic to reach whatever godforsaken parking lot he's sighted. Probably the Coliseum parking lot, which should be skeleton-empty in these winter months. "OK. So, Nomar. That wasn't an easy trade."

"No." Theo puts his feet up on his desk and tosses a tapeball up into the air, catching it easily. "But we can't think like fans."

" _We can't think like fans._ Precisely what I've been _saying_." Billy pauses and there's a very faint noise that makes Theo think he's chewing on his lower lip. Theo scratches at the tapeball, peeling up a stray sliver of masking tape. "We can't think like players either. When you let old baseball players run teams, they act like old baseball players. They make all the wrong moves 'cause they still want to be one of the boys. Pathetic." Another pause, more faint lip-chewing noises, and a slight tapping, like Billy's drumming the fingers of his free hand on the wheel. "That's why I like you so much, kid. It's not like talkin' to some fat fucking idiot who wishes he was still strapping on a jock and sweating through his shorts out there."

"Thanks," Theo says. "Now we're gonna get to the Winter Meetings and I'm gonna be picturing everyone in a sweaty jock."

Billy laughs, a sharp abbreviated bark. "You think I'm joking, but I'm serious. That's half of what's wrong with baseball. Fat old men still dreaming about playing ball themselves."

"I used to, you know," Theo says.

"Used to what?"

"Want to play ball. I mean, I did play, when I was a kid-- Little League and my school team and whatever. I always wanted to go pro. "

"Everyone wants to at some point. It's the fucking _American dream_." Billy is really getting worked up now. This is one of his favorite subjects. "That's fine. That's grade-fucking-A _normal_. But do you still dream about it? Do you still spend your days and nights and when-the-fuck-evers trying to be one of the 'boys' so they'll let you onto the fucking field?"

"No," Theo answers, truthfully. "I'm pretty happy looking _at_ the field. These days I think I'd just look stupid on it."

"There you go. That's what I'm talking about. You're not one of those flabby head-in-the-lightbanks jerkoffs."

"Thanks. I think."

Billy laughs, sounding more relaxed than he has in a while. "Yeah. You don't have all that fucking stupid 'wanting what you don't got' baggage hanging off you. Lucky guy."

"I do what I have to do, that's all." Theo pauses. Thinks. "Same as you."

"Same as me? Not quite." Billy seems suddenly sad, almost wistful, even though wistfulness is not the kind of emotion that Theo can imagine him indulging in. "You got it down a lot better than I do."

"Oh." Theo pushes the tapeball along the edge of his desk with the back of a pencil. He's not quite sure what to say. Billy, after all, is the veteran GM. Billy is the expert. Billy is the one they wrote a fucking _book_ about.

He can hear the muted rumble of a car starting up again. "Hey," Billy says, "I'd better get going. I'll talk to you later. Lemme know if you need to clear some shit off your roster anytime before the Meetings."

"Sure," Theo says. He hangs up and stares at the tapeball. He can't shake the feeling that he's just missed something fairly important.

\----

The Winter Meetings are a unique baseball event because, for once, there aren't any players or fans around: just owners and GMs and team presidents and managers. It's a meet-up for the people who get things done behind the scenes, not on the field. Theo likes the Winter Meetings, because it cuts down on the bullshit. There's not much good-for-TV action, so the only reporters who show up are of the print variety, and only the baseball-centric ones bother coming around. These are the reporters that Theo likes best; these are the guys he might have been.

On the other hand, the entire hotel is filled with management and management-types trying to outwit each other, so while the external bullshit level is low, the internal bullshit level is high. Everyone is kind of talking around each other, cereal-box-decoder-ring sort of silly and cautious, trying to feel each other out without giving anything away. It's a little bit exhilarating and a lot dumb.

It's also practically Billy's natural habitat.

Theo spends most of the first day just figuring out who has sent whom, because some teams just send the GM and some attendants while some teams send everyone from the manager in the dugout to the team president. He orders some of his hand-picked assistants out into the fray and they report back all day long to John Henry's hotel room, where they have a bank of big whiteboards set up. On one of the whiteboards they work up an erasable marker map of team representatives, covered in squiggly lines showing old affiliations and lines of communication. The other whiteboards will soon be filled with player names and statistics and rumored trades. The hotel room smells so strongly of marker that Henry has to go and open the window in spite of the humid California heat, just so they don't all get lightheaded and pass out.

He listens to the reports as they roll in and makes some phone calls, reconnecting with the people who have the power to make something happen for him. He saves Billy for last and ends up calling him just after 9 at night, a little strung out from a phone call to Omar Minaya that had started out a simple exchange of pleasantries and had quickly turned into an incredibly long and complex conversation about everything in the world that had anything to do with Pedro Martinez. Theo is drained, feeling like Omar's just peeled back his scalp and had an exciting rummage in his brain.

"You sound like shit," is the first thing Billy Beane says to him when he picks up the phone and hears Theo's (tired, but surely not _that_ shitty) greeting. "Hotel bar. Table all the way to the back and in the left corner. Twenty minutes. See ya." Then he hangs up and Theo's left staring at his phone in a bemused way. This seems to happen a lot with Billy.

Twenty minutes later he's in the bar, hair still spiky-wet from his shower, hoping his black collared shirt doesn't have any creases from his admittedly haphazard packing practices. Billy's wearing a short-sleeved bright green collared shirt, unapologetically rumpled, with very worn-looking khaki shorts. Theo reaches the table at the exact same moment that a waitress carrying two beers does. The bar is one of those incredibly dark, incredibly pretentious and modern ones, all done up in shades of black and purple and red. Everyone there is unbearably cool. The waitress smiles warmly at Theo, whose all-black outfit must pass some kind of ironic hipster code, grimaces a little at Billy, sets down the beer and stalks away.

They just stare at one another for a couple of minutes, sipping their beer. They've been talking for years, but haven't actually seen each other since the last Winter Meeting, which is kind of ridiculous when Theo stops to think about it. Surely Billy could have contrived to show up when Theo was in Oakland, or he could have made the trip to Boston once in a while, but Billy usually seemed oddly determined to avoid Theo in person. Even at the last Winter Meeting they had only seen each other in a professional capacity, never over drinks, never even for an informal chat. Theo lifts his glass and glances at Billy through the yellow light of the beer. He wonders what changed. Maybe it had to do with trading Nomar, and whatever that made Billy think of him.

"Rough day?" Billy asks, leaning back in his seat.

Theo notices that Billy's already finished half his beer and wonders if he should try to catch up. "Not that rough. Just at the end. Talked to Omar."

Billy nods. "Me too. He wants pitching." Theo raises an eyebrow, and Billy shakes his head. "He doesn't want any of my guys, I think he was just covering his bases. He wants a star. A _Latino_ star." Billy smirks, the kind of expression that Theo has, until now, mostly had to imagine over the phone. The reality of it is not that different from his mental picture. "All my big guys are white. Omar doesn't want shit from me."

This puts Omar's interest in Pedro in a new light and distracts Theo for a minute while he sifts through the implications. Eventually he looks up and realizes that Billy has been watching him with amusement. Theo smiles-- guilty as charged.

"What about Chavez?"

The way that Billy's expression slides from amused to shocked is gratifying in a way that Theo doesn't bother to examine too closely. "Chavez? What about him?"

"He's not white." Theo's grin widens as he watches Billy visibly relax into his seat. He wonders what Billy was afraid of. Maybe he thought Theo was going to make him a trade offer.

"Chavvy's _practically_ white. I don't think he even speaks Spanish." Theo raises his eyebrows, both of them this time. Billy grins and leans forward over his beer again. Obviously some Chavez-ian crisis has just been avoided, but it's probably something that only Billy will ever know, or understand. "He's definitely not Hispanic enough for crazy Omar Minaya and his plot to revive the Mets through cultural fucking awareness."

It's impossible to not laugh at this, so Theo does. He takes a long draught of beer to settle himself down before talking again. "Oh, c'mon. He's targeting a market, right? Get more Latino fans into the team, attract better Latino players to the team. He probably thinks Latin America's where the all new talent's gonna come from these days."

"Isn't it?" Billy looks tense again.

Theo waggles his head noncommittally and smiles down at his beer.

Billy signals the waitress for more drinks and twirls his hand at Theo, telling him to finish up the beer he's got now. Theo's busy downing his beer when the waitress comes to take their order and doesn't hear what Billy says, but when she comes back she's bearing an entire tray of tiny glasses, the shots inside gleaming a rainbow of translucent jewel colors.

"Oh hell no," Theo says, boggling at the tray. "No way in hell."

Billy smiles in a way that quirks up one corner of his mouth and makes him look, in the muted bar light, sort of appealingly insane. "Let's see what you're made of, kid," he says, and that's when Theo realizes that Billy is probably going to get him drunk so that he can pump him for information about the next big player market, among other things. Theo also realizes that he brought this entirely on himself. He should know better than to bring up stuff like that around Billy.

As he grabs a shot and brings it to his lips, his movements mirrored by Billy, he realizes that if Billy is also getting _himself_ drunk, this can't be the case. But by then the shot is burning its way down his throat like vaporous liquid fire, and he doesn't think about much else for the rest of the night.

\----

On the second day they wake up early, grab enormous cups of coffee, and reconvene in Henry's room to look at the whiteboards, mostly still pristine. Normally the owners wouldn't come down, but the offseason after winning the World Series is a delicate time for a team, something this ownership group knows well, and they want to be on-scene. Henry and Lucchino both made the trip, for which Theo is equal parts grateful and annoyed. At least he doesn't have to deal with the _entire_ front office looking over his shoulder; Werner, third member of the triumvirate Boston ownership, stayed at home to provide off-scene updates via cell phone and email.

Lucchino, already looking more strung-out and tired than a moderately hung-over Theo, hands Theo a list and tells him to get out there and start pumping.

'Pumping' is Boston front office vernacular for the whole business of going around trying to extract valuable information from people without giving valuable information away. Finding out who was here isn't difficult, nobody's trying to hide it and there isn't anything at stake, so the assistants were able to do most of yesterday's grunt-work. Today they have to get down to the real business of the Winter Meetings, though. Theo has to go out and earn his keep.

He's down in the lobby busy pumping Dave Dombrowski, who is unbearably smug because the topic of everyone's conversation is the rumor that he's getting Kenny Rogers, and he knows it. Theo is just about to give Dombrowski up as a bad job when he sees Billy sidle into the lobby with a carefully blank look on his face. Theo asks Dombrowki another question and watches Billy over Dombrowski's shoulder, just to see him in action.

Billy walks up to John Schuerholz and says something that immediately sets Schuerholz to smiling. Billy puts a hand between Schuerholz's shoulder blades, all casual ease, and this, Theo knows, is Billy playing into Schuerholz's desire to be "one of the boys." It might look a little strange to an outsider; the dignified older man being charmed by the rumpled younger man, respect going in the wrong directions. It might look a little strange even to an insider, because anyone who knows the furor over Moneyball will know that Billy isn't generally so well-regarded by the old school camp of baseball guys. But Theo knows what's going on here, and he's enjoying a chance to watch it played out to perfection right in front of him.

Billy is something that Schuerholz never was-- namely, a former ballplayer, for real-- and it doesn't matter how successful Schuerholz is, how much respect he commands, he still wants what Billy has, and Billy knows this probably better than Schuerholz does. This is true of many people in baseball management, and is exactly what Billy rants about to Theo all the time. Still, to say that Billy is not above exploiting this would be like saying that the ground is not above the sky.

The thing that Theo knows, that Schuerholz does not know, is that Billy doesn't want what he has. Billy hates the fact that he used to be a baseball player. Billy likes baseball players, but would probably be a much happier man if he had never been one. Schuerholz would know this if he had read the book, but a surprising majority of baseball people haven't even cracked it. Some of them even think Billy himself wrote it, which is so crazy that Theo can't even begin to argue with them if they mention it, and can only laugh. He can't imagine Billy ever sitting in one place long enough to write a book.

He watches Billy's mouth form a word that looks like 'pitcher'. Two entirely separate things start happening in Theo's brain.

In one train of thought he's noticing that Billy is talking about pitchers with John Schuerholz, and Theo starts to think about what players could be involved in talk like that. Everyone has been saying that Billy is under a money crunch again and needs to break up the Big 3-- Zito, Mulder, Hudson. If Billy's talking about this with the Braves, that's news, and that will have bearing on what the Red Sox do. Theo had been toying with the idea of trying to get one of the Big 3 himself.

The rest of his mind is completely given over to the task of keeping Dombrowski from realizing any of this is going on, because half of getting an advantage at these meetings is making sure no one else gets one. These two things occupy his mind so fully that he actually jumps a little bit, his shoulders and heels coming up, when Billy appears behind him and taps him on the shoulder.

"Mind if I steal him away for a bit?" Billy asks, all toothy smiles with the corners of his eyes reassuringly creased, _steal him away for a bit_ , like they're at a ballroom dance and Billy's trying to politely cut in for the next song. Dombrowski nods and waves him off, obviously bored with Theo's strategic obtuseness. Billy puts a hand in the center of Theo's back and gently steers him towards the elevators.

"That's not gonna work on me, y'know," Theo mutters, allowing himself to be steered anyways.

"What's not?"

"Your... buddy-buddy ballplayer thing." Theo twitches the muscles of his back a little, right where Billy has his hand.

Billy laughs and gently pushes Theo into the elevator, slides his hand up Theo's spine until it's high enough that he can curl it around Theo's shoulder, making Theo shiver a little. The gesture was totally unnecessary and he doesn't know what to make of it.

"No worries, kid," Billy says. "I'm not tryin' to hit you up for trades... right now, anyways."

"What's up, then?"

The elevator door opens and Billy gives his shoulder a little tug to indicate that he should follow, then lets go and sets off down the hotel corridor. As if Theo wouldn't follow anyways. The floor is exactly like every other residential floor in the hotel, but Billy's moving with definite purpose, so Theo guesses that they're heading for Billy's room. Billy still hasn't answered his question.

Theo has to trot a little to catch up to Billy so that he can get in stride with him. He doesn't know who else is staying on this floor; if it was Brian Cashman he was following, he might imagine that the Yankees had reserved the entire floor, but this is highly unlikely for the A's, who, last he heard, still make players pay for their own candy bars in the clubhouse. In any event, he doesn't want someone popping out of their room and seeing him tagging after Billy like a puppy on a leash.

Billy stops abruptly and digs a keycard out of his pocket so that he can open the door. This takes him a minute, as he's got a ridiculous amount of things in his pockets: money, credit cards, ID cards, business cards, lots and lots of folded-up pieces of paper with undoubtedly vital baseball information on them. Theo, in a moment of tapeball-esque rebellious jocularity, puts a hand in the middle of Billy's back. Billy stiffens imperceptibly-- Theo wouldn't be able to tell at all if he couldn't feel Billy's muscles tense up under his hand-- but otherwise acts like he doesn't notice.

Eventually he gets the door open, of course. The room is a lot smaller than John Henry's room, which is probably the largest suite this hotel offers, and is smaller even than Theo's room, which is a more modest but still two-roomed suite. Billy's staying in the cheapest type of room here: one room with a tiny bathroom, hardly any space between the bed and the wall on the far side of the room, the foot of it entirely taken up with a little dresser with a TV on top. There's a tiny desk, piled high with papers, and a little chair that has its seat serving as additional paper pile storage.

Billy flops himself onto the bed and turns on the TV. Theo closes the door behind him and realizes that his options are limited. He can move the papers off the desk chair, but he would probably get them out of order somehow, and he of course knows all about Billy's enormous, volcanic rage. He could sit on the toilet in the bathroom and shout in towards Billy. Or he could sit on the bed.

After a minute Billy makes the decision for him by shifting a little away from the center of the bed and rolling his eyes towards Theo without moving any other part of his head. "C'mon," he mutters, just barely loud enough to be heard over the TV, "I don't have rabies."

Theo chuckles a little and sits down, hesitating a bit before toeing off his shoes and swinging his legs up onto the bed. He looks at the TV. Billy has put on the Home and Garden Channel, something Theo cannot imagine him actually watching. He looks over at Billy and, sure enough, Billy is ignoring the TV entirely and watching Theo instead.

This is making him a little uncomfortable, but Theo thinks that's a pretty reasonable reaction, under the circumstances. He would feel a lot better if Billy would just explain what they're doing here. There's no point in pretending that he hasn't seen Billy looking at him, so he stares right back.

Eventually Billy huffs out a small laugh and turns his eyes back to the TV. Theo keeps looking at him. It's only fair. Billy's eyes are brown and his hair is spiked up at the front. There are a few gray hairs powdering his sideburns, but he doesn't really look like a man in his 40s.

Theo just turned 31, and looks about 22. He looks way too young to be running a baseball team. He knows this because everyone keeps telling him so. "You're too young," people say, "you're too..." They never finish the statement, waving their hands to indicate some other thing he's too much of. Theo always wonders-- too what?

Billy doesn't really look like a guy running a baseball team either, if it comes to that. For some reason this makes Theo feel a little better. He relaxes against the headboard and watches TV with Billy for a while.

The show is called FreeStyle. Theo has never seen it before but he gets the idea quickly enough; some kind of interior decorator comes in, looks at a room in someone's home, takes everything out of it and then puts everything back in, plus some stuff from other parts of the house, in a new way. It's the same room, and it doesn't cost anything, but after the designer's done with it the room looks completely different. Billy appears to be watching very intently.

The next show after FreeStyle is called reDesign and seems to involve really, really rich people. Billy loses interest and goes back to staring at Theo.

"Trying to FreeStyle the A's?" Theo asks. It's cheesy, hyperobvious, but if he doesn't get Billy talking soon, doesn't find out why Billy dragged him up here, he's going to have to just get up and leave. Not that he doesn't enjoy spending time with Billy, in person, but at the Winter Meetings time is money and all that.

"Maybe." Billy leans closer and the room suddenly seems stifling, way too small. Billy sits up so that he's mostly between Theo and the TV, his gaze worryingly intense. "Look. Don't you ever get _sick of the bullshit?_ "

"The bullshit?" Theo swallows and tries to remember everything he's done since he got here, if he's done anything Billy would categorize as 'bullshit'.

"The fucking bullshit that's _all over_ these fucking management circle jerks." Billy leans in and grabs Theo's arm, hard. It's clearly very important that Theo understands this. "Don't you just want to go up to some of these guys and fucking _punch them in the head?_ "

Theo blinks. He can't honestly say that he's wanted to punch anyone in the head since he got here. That may be the fundamental difference between Billy and himself, though. Billy was fucked over by the system, so when he sees guys doing the same thing to baseball that baseball did to him, he gets angry. He wants to hit things. Theo never went into the system, so while he can recognize stupid things being done, it doesn't ever make him particularly, personally outraged.

"Sometimes," Billy says, tightening his fingers just below Theo's elbow, "sometimes I get these _impulses_. And I'm always afraid I'm just gonna _do_ shit. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just have to get the fuck out of there before I do. That's what... I was talking to those guys, that drooling idiot Schuerholz, and I just. I had to get _out_ of there. Fuck knows what I woulda done."

"OK." Theo eyes Billy warily. "I understand needing to get away. Come back to your room or... whatever. But, uh. Why am _I_ here?"

"Were you fucking _listening_? Sometimes I just _act on those terrible fucking impulses_."

Theo wrinkles his nose a little, thinking that over. "I'm an impulse?"

"You are the most impossible fucking kid in the whole fucking universe," Billy says, and that's when he leans in towards Theo and kisses him.

\----

The third day starts out as a big blur. Somehow Theo finds his way to Henry's room at a not-too-late hour, and somehow a big cup of coffee ends up in front of him. He closes his eyes and just inhales the steam for a while. There's a lot more information on the whiteboards than there was the day before, but he can't focus on them just now.

Billy Beane kissed him. Billy Beane _put his hand down Theo's pants_. Theo's not sure if he should feel assaulted or not; it's not like he encouraged Billy, or did anything, really. He's pretty sure he was in shock the whole time. He's still in shock.

Billy Beane _humped Theo's leg_ until he generated an enormous wet spot on the front of his rumpled khaki shorts, and a little bit on Theo's pants. Will semen come out of black denim? He doesn't know. He contemplates asking Lucchino for advice and has to put his head down on the desk lest he burst into incredibly inappropriate laughter.

When he picks his head up, Henry is looking at him oddly. Theo taps the rim of his coffee cup and Henry nods sympathetically. He thinks Theo's been up all night working. Theo is a good guy, a good GM: it would be just like him to do that.

He wonders what Henry would say if Theo told him what he really did last night. "Oh, yeah, so, I think the Braves are going after one of the Big 3, and Dombrowski's definitely getting Rogers, pitching is gonna be expensive. The Mets want Pedro. I had a nice long talk with Billy Beane, then I let him get to third base with me and afterward he freaked out and locked himself in the bathroom." Third base. Is it possible that Billy broke his mind? He's not sure. Maybe. He's never touched another guy before. He's never even _thought_ about it.

Lucchino's talking about Kevin Millar. Theo knows he should be paying attention; this meeting may basically decide Millar's fate, and he likes Millar a lot, wants to do right by the guy, but he just can't concentrate.

Billy came and slumped on top of Theo, panting. He had lifted himself up, looked down at his shorts, then looked at Theo. Theo has an idea of what he looked like because he had a good long look at himself in the mirror after he managed to stagger back to his own room: shirt all wrinkled up and hanging funny (somehow Billy managed to rip the bottom button clean off), pants gapping open, hair sticking up crazily, his eyes huge and staring. He probably looked slightly worse than that, right after the fact, and the crazy intensity had dropped out of Billy's eyes like the bottom dropping out of a carnival ride.

" _Shit_ ," Billy had said. Then he had gotten up and locked himself in the bathroom.

Theo had attempted to put himself back together-- an attempt destined to failure because of the missing shirt button, and his hair would not lie flat at all, and he had still been dazed. He had also been half hard himself, and part of him wanted to stay, grab some of Billy's baseball stat sheets and jerk off into them, leaving them spread on the bed like some kind of ruined symbol for Billy to decipher later, but even in his stunned state he had recognized that as a direction in which madness lay.

After stumbling to the elevator and getting off at the wrong floor twice, thankfully not meeting any other GMs, he had made it back to his own room. There were papers all over his desk, things he should attend to, but he hadn't been able to touch them. All he could do was turn his shower on, strip naked and sit under the spray for two hours, eyes closed and silently thanking the enormous hotel hot water tanks.

With a huge effort Theo turns his mind back to what Lucchino's saying. "A couple years ago we might have been able to send him back to Japan for something, but they're not stupid, it's not going to happen now. I mean, the guy's a whole lot fatter than he used to be, at the very least."

"Look," Theo says, then stops, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. He sounds like he spent the whole night screaming. Everyone swivels around to stare at him, and he carefully clears his throat before continuing. "OK. Look. His numbers weren't bad. He's up for arbitration at the end of next season. Why don't we just hang onto him for a year, and if his numbers drop again we just won't go to arb next winter. It's not like he's too expensive, and at worst he's a bench player who keeps the clubhouse happy."

Peter Woodfork, one of Theo's assistants, is tapping at the keyboard of his laptop and looking mutinous. Peter's a big numbers guy, and Theo knows that phrases like "player who keeps the clubhouse happy" make Peter grind his molars, but Millar's numbers weren't bad this year, and sometimes being the GM means looking at the bigger picture.

Theo knows what Billy would say. Billy would say that Theo should trade Millar now, while his value is high, because he and Theo both know that it's probably going to come down soon. Theo is counting on the fact that he will probably be able to find someone who doesn't know that, or is idiotically willing to ignore it. Billy would say that hanging onto Millar now is sentimental and weak-willed. But the Athletics are not the Red Sox.

"We need to keep Manny happy," Henry says. "That's going to be hard in his first season away from Pedro in four years."

Theo nods. "Right. Pedro _and_ Millar... that would be asking Manny to be mature."

Everyone looks at each other, grimly smiling. Asking Manny to be mature would be like asking the ocean to turn bright pink. You could ask all day long and it wouldn't make the slightest difference.

"Millar for another year." Lucchino crisply taps the small stack of papers in front of him against the table, evening out the edges before setting it aside. An aide starts making squeaky notes on the whiteboards, filling in Millar's spot on their roster and erasing potential replacements and trades they had been considering.

Peter sets his jaw and goes back to furiously typing at his laptop. Theo looks over at him with a sympathetic half-smile. Retaining Millar the very height of his value seems stupid to Peter, who gets paid to analyze numbers and statistical trends, and it would look stupid to Billy, who has to work with the payroll of a Little League team. Theo sees the bigger picture, and Theo, thanks to the owners, has money. He can take all of this information-- statistical, financial, logical, emotional-- and turn it into a real winning team. That and a healthy dose of luck got them a World Series ring.

The Red Sox always had the talent. What they needed was someone willing to make the unbiased move, the unpopular move, so long as it was the right one. Henry and Lucchino and Werner had thought that Billy was that person: he was certainly crazy enough and smart enough. Billy, though, hadn't been the one to pick up the reins. Theo was.

Boston thought they needed someone crazy. Billy knew. It must have been part of his decision, helping him to make up his mind when he realized that craziness wasn't what the Red Sox _really_ needed. Theo's not sure what it is that he has that Billy doesn't, what it is that makes _him_ what the Red Sox actually required, but he's starting to understand.

Whatever that _thing_ is, it's more or less the same thing that drives Billy to call him after hours, at all hours. Maybe it's the same thing that made Billy impulsively pull him up to a hotel room in the middle of the Winter Meetings.

None of this will make sense, Theo guesses, rubbing the back of his neck and letting the coffee soothe him back into sanity, until he figures out what that thing is.

>  **December 16, 2004:** The Oakland A's trade Tim Hudson to the Atlanta Braves for Juan Cruz, Dan Meyer, and Charles Thomas.
> 
>  **December 17, 2004:** The Boston Red Sox sign free agent David Wells.
> 
>  **December 18, 2004:** The Oakland A's trade Mark Mulder to the St. Louis Cardinals for Dan Haren, Kiko Calero, and Daric Barton.
> 
>  **December 19, 2004:** The Boston Red Sox sign free agent Edgar Renteria.

It's a week after the Winter Meetings before Theo hears from Billy again, and that's just a terse, business-like phone call to tell Theo that Billy's traded Tim Hudson to the Braves for Charles Thomas and Juan Cruz and Dan Meyer, totally underwhelming names to Theo, except maybe for Meyer. Apparently he thinks Theo deserves to know, maybe he feels a little guilty that he never really gave Theo a chance to bid on Hudson if he'd wanted to, or maybe it's for some other reason. The guilt is definitely in there, though.

"It's OK, he's a Georgia kid, they love that hometown shit in Atlanta," Billy says. He sounds flat, like he's rehearsed his lines.

"What about Mulder?" Theo thumps a tapeball against the wall next to his desk. "What about Zito? How're they taking it?"

Billy makes a soft sound, sucking on his lip, maybe. "Who the fuck cares? It's not their fucking place to give a fuck about who gets traded and who doesn't."

"That's stupid," Theo says. He lets the tapeball drop with a dull thud to the center of his blotter and starts picking at the sleeve of his sweater. "Shit like that affects the team. 'Specially shit like I heard was up with the three of them."

Silence, broken a little by the slight whistling sound of Billy breathing down the line. Eventually he sucks in a breath and says, "Like. What kinda shit." He's tense and controlled, his voice coiled with warning.

"That they were a little too close to each other." Theo drops his sleeve and thumps the tapeball against the wall again. He hasn't heard that, not exactly, but he's heard plenty of jokes, and that's almost the same thing. He's a little mad at Billy anyways; if Billy was going to freak out and avoid him, maybe Billy shouldn't have done all that shit in the first place. Theo has been pretty much a bystander for this whole thing.

"That's." Billy sounds somewhere between laughing and screaming. "Where the fuck did you hear bullshit like that."

"Around. People talk. _Baseball_ people talk, Billy, especially about shit like that."

"Shit like that. God." Billy sighs. "I told you about the fact that I have poor fucking impulse control, right?"

"You did," Theo says, even as even can be. He's not going to give an inch here.

"So I understand if you don't want to talk, you know. Anymore. But I thought, Hudson, I should let you know. I know you were kinda interested."

"Oh, fuck you, honestly. Why would I not want to talk anymore?" Billy makes a surprised sound, like a startled cat, and Theo has to laugh. "Oh come on. Like anyone else is as fun to talk baseball with. Don't be an asshole."

"I'm all asshole," Billy mutters, but it's a reflexive statement, there's no poison in it.

"All asshole? Really? Will you let me see for myself?"

The background breathing cuts off as Billy moves his head away from the phone for a minute. When he comes back, he sounds strangled. "OK. I'm gonna just. I'm gonna hang up, and I'll call you back when I've had a chance to figure out how to talk to you without you killing me dead over the phone. I don't... do you even... OK, no, don't even answer that. I'll call you back when I finish trading Mulder."

"Wait, you're trading Mulder? Where's he going? Who's getting Mulder?"

Theo is still yelling, hunched over and intent, tapeball and drama forgotten, _who's getting Mulder_ , as Billy hangs up the phone.

\----

Billy calls two days later to tell Theo that the Cardinals are getting Mulder, and the A's are getting, among others, pitcher Danny Haren in return.

"Jerk." Theo's in his office again, throwing pencils at the ceiling, probably the only person in the entire stadium right now. He and Billy had talked a lot about Haren for a month or so, back in July. Theo had wanted Haren pretty badly. "So Zito's the one you're keeping, huh?"

"We're keeping Zito until he becomes a free agent," Billy says, carefully precise. "Then we won't be able to afford him. Fucker's probably going to hire Boras."

"We could afford him. If you want, you know, we could buy him up. Let you visit him sometimes." Zito kenneling. The idea makes Theo smile.

"I hope he'll go National League." Billy seems earnest, sincere, and Theo realizes with a start that both Hudson and Mulder were traded to National League teams, like Billy can't stand to see his former players any more than he absolutely has to, like he doesn't want them running into him or Zito on two or more roadtrips a year.

"How's Zito holding up as the last of the Big 3?" Theo can't help but think of Zito as a kind of taller, skinnier, whiter Manny Ramirez. He's heard some weird shit about Zito, on and off the field, and his own personal reference for weird, zoney, moody, idiot savant ballplayers is of course Manny. Manny, he knows, would not take the trading of his two favorite friends away very gracefully, and he imagines that Zito, in his own Zito way, is much the same.

There's a pause, during which Theo finally gets a pencil to stick in the ceiling. "Zito will get over it," Billy says, and he sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as he's trying to convince Theo. "Eventually. Especially if he doesn't have to see me around." There's another pause, giving Theo time to puzzle over that one. "Look. If you're not. Uh, you didn't seem mad, so. I mean, if you're not mad, can I. Uh. I've never really done the tourist shit in Boston, you think I could maybe."

There's yet another pause, during which Theo realizes that Billy is asking if he can come visit without actually asking. "Sure. Tell me when you can fly out, I'll pick you up." Theo's already leaning for his planner, scrabbling for a fresh pencil, ready to mark this down. Billy isn't being very sneaky about this; he obviously wants to get out of Oakland for some reason, did something to someone and needs time to let it all cool down, but Theo isn't going to pry. Not just yet, anyways.

"Uhhh. How about." There's a clicking sound, Billy's probably booking a flight on his computer right this very second. "The 22nd? Eight pm?"

That's only in two days, but Theo erases a couple of lines and pencils it in. "Sure. No problem. Call me when you touch down, that'll give me enough time to get out there."

"OK." More clicking. "Do you know, uh, a hotel that's not where the teams stay..."

"I know my apartment, where you can stay." Billy starts to make a noise of protest and Theo just talks right over him. "It's big enough. It's _very_ cost-effective."

"Fuck you," Billy says, but Theo doesn't need to see him to know that he's smiling.

\----

Logan airport is a labyrinth of raised concrete roads and strange angles where you can see the exact place you need to be twenty feet in a straight line in front of you, but you have to wind your way half a mile around the airport before you can actually get there. It used to be that only locals had a prayer of navigating it, but now even that small comfort is gone. The outlying tendrils of the Big Dig touch down here; all the access roads are under construction, and the roads leading into and out of the airport change every week. Theo treats each and every trip into Logan like a personal challenge to his intelligence and his ability to think abstractly. Driving into the airport is a character building experience, and he relishes the trial.

Parking is a whole other set of difficulties, so Theo just tries to time it as best he can, judging from when Billy calls, as soon as his airplane wheels hit the ground. If he's done this right he should pull up outside the terminal shortly before Billy comes outside, and he won't have to sit there long enough to attract the attention of the over-alert airport cops.

The nearest cop is just starting to give his car a skeptical once-over when Billy emerges from the baggage claim gates in the middle of a boisterously excited group of Japanese tourists. Billy has to work to get himself untangled from them, looking even more rumpled than usual. Theo gets out of the car so Billy can see him, keeping one hand on the door handle to keep the cop from yelling that he can't park by the curb. Everyone is preoccupied and annoyed when they get out of the airport, probably no one will recognize him in time to ask for an autograph.

Billy's hair is sticking up in the back of his head and Theo gets this crazy urge, as he walks over, to put his hand out and smooth it down. It would be a quick gesture, natural, simple, but he can't bring himself to do it and settles for a distant one-armed hug.

"Sorry." Billy shrugs his hugging arm a little. "Too fuckin' gross right now. I _smell_."

"The Logan experience."

"No fucking kidding." Billy shakes his head and what Theo had taken for some new gray hair flies off in a fine whitish powder. It takes him a second to realize that it's concrete dust. Obviously Billy had to walk under some interior construction to get out here.

Billy slumps into the passenger seat with a sigh, eyes automatically locking onto the digital clock on the car radio before looking down at his own watch, doing the math. Theo notes that Billy doesn't bother to change his watch to local time. Theo never does either, when he's time-zone-jumping with the team during the season. It's easier to just add or subtract the hours in your head. It's 8:45 pm Boston time and the sky is pitch black where it's not bruised by light pollution. It's only 5:45 back in Oakland and it would have still been mostly light out when Billy left.

Between the night and the yellow Logan lights it's hard to see anything, so it's not until they get out of the airport and into the painfully bright first section of the Ted Williams tunnel that Theo can really see Billy's face. He's not staring at Billy, of course-- that would be suicidal on Boston roads. But he doesn't need to stare to see the bruise, stark against the paleness of Billy's skin, high on his cheekbone.

"Bar fight?" he asks, half wishing he could look over at Billy to gauge his reaction, half relieved that he can't. With anyone else it might be a joke, but with Billy it's an actual possibility.

There's a small movement at the corner of his eye, and he thinks Billy maybe lifted a hand to his cheek. "Uh. No. Chavez, actually."

" _Chavez?_ You got beat up by your own third baseman?"

"Fuck no, kid, c'mon now." Billy slouches further down in the seat, relaxing by degrees. "He didn't... he didn't fucking beat me up. He got one good angry swing in before I pinned him." Theo gets a sudden mental image of Billy slamming his body against a furious Eric Chavez, pinning him to a wall with hands and hips, and he almost jerks the car into oncoming traffic. Billy, probably well accustomed to his own terrible driving, doesn't even notice. "He thinks I deserved it. Did him some good to get it outta his system, anyhow."

Theo remains quiet for a minute so that he can maneuver the car out of the tunnel. A dented Toyota with a Red Sox sticker on the bumper cuts him off and honks at the driver in front of him. Theo takes this in stride and simply leans on his horn until the Toyota lowers a window and a fist waves wildly out, middle finger extended. Having thus made certain the Toyota is aware of his opinion of its driving, Boston road etiquette having been paid its full due, Theo relaxes again and risks a glance at Billy.

"You're aware," he says, "how seriously fucked up that is?"

Billy blinks, apparently not aware. He half frowns, maybe not sure if Theo is joking or not.

Theo sighs and returns his eyes to the road. He swings the car around a narrow turn, streetlights exploding through the windows like waterbombs of white. "You seriously don't see how fucked up that is? Most general managers don't have the kind of relationship with their players where it's OK for them to get in a fist fight." He risks another quick glance at Billy, but it's too fast to tell him anything. "Most GMs aren't ever going to even _be in a position_ where they _could_ conceivably get into a fist fight with a player. That's, no offense, pretty fucking crazy."

Billy folds his arms over his chest, tucking the seatbelt under his forearms. "When did I ever say I _wasn't_ fucking crazy?"

"Fuck, Billy, you're not a manager. You're not in the dugout every day, or, or, _ever!_ You shouldn't even be around the players often enough for them to _know_ you well enough to want to slug you in the face!"

"Oh, I dunno. I don't think you have to be around me real often to want to slug me in the face."

Theo snorts, exasperated and amused in spite of himself, and they make it the rest of the way to his apartment in silence. He pulls up in front of the building and props the parking permit up on his dashboard. Billy doesn't even react, which tells Theo that he doesn't understand how insanely rare it is to have a parking spot like this, which means in turn that he doesn't really have any idea how incredibly powerful Theo is here. In Boston, it's hard to read power or wealth from clothing or cars, but it's easy to read it from apartment location and parking spots. If Billy doesn't get it, that's fine by Theo. He's embarrassed by his status in Boston more often than not.

They get out of the car and Billy looks up at the apartment building, his face washed out again by the streetlights, the bruise looking black against the paleness of his skin. Theo walks around the car and leans on the passenger side, leaving Billy trapped between Theo and the apartment's front door.

"So," Theo says, looking up at the sky. "What exactly did you do to piss Chavez off so much?"

"Nothing. You know."

"No, actually, I _don't_ know. Which would be why I'm asking."

Billy sighs and Theo lets his head drop to look at him. "You _do_ know," Billy says, looking tired in the streetlight. "Chavvy's been with the team a long time. He got down 'bout the trade shit. Mulder, Huddy, they were big players, and his buddies. He can't see the forest for the fuckin' trees, like every other player in the goddamn sport." Theo raises an eyebrow and Billy waves a hand vaguely. "Like Nomar, yeah?"

"Actually. No." Billy blinks, and Theo levers himself up off the car, moving past Billy towards his front door, talking all the while in the clear explanatory tone and practiced phrasing he uses with reporters, words he's said a hundred thousand times to himself and his friends and family. "Nomar's trade was a surprise to the fans, yes. And the media. They didn't think anyone would do it. But to the players, no, it wasn't a surprise and it wasn't all that unwelcome. Nomar'd been sulking for weeks before the trade. He was bringing everyone who came anywhere near the bench down. He wasn't cheering with the team during rallies, he wasn't congratulating guys who hit home runs. He was brooding and being miserable and selfish. Anyone else would've been off the team ages before we got rid of him. The team wasn't sad, mostly, to see him go. It wasn't that I'd traded away Nomar... it was more like he only lasted as long as he did because he was Nomar."

Billy is silent, thinking that over. Theo gestures him into the apartment front hall and closes the door behind them, trying not to notice how the bruise shows up brighter, more vibrant, almost multi-colored in the stronger interior light.

\----

"I can't believe you haven't done _any_ of this stuff before." They're sitting in Cheers, the original one that fronts onto Beacon Street. Billy, it turned out, hadn't been joking when he said he'd never done any of the touristy shit in Boston, so Theo is doing his best to hit the high points.

Billy shrugs. "We didn't really do vacations when I was a kid."

"You're not a kid anymore, Billy. You can take a vacation now if you want."

"Too busy."

Theo dips one of his French fries into his ketchup and drags it around his plate, drawing red squiggles. Without even thinking about it he starts doodling a baseball diamond. "Man, I know baseball takes up a lot of time, but..."

"Oh c'mon, kid, do _you_ get any offseason? 'Cause I know I don't."

"That's not what I mean." Theo puts a blob of ketchup on the pitcher's mound. "It's not that hard to travel around to cities with the team, you take a day, go to some museums and whatever. See the country."

Billy leans over the table to look at Theo's plate. "Nice," he says. "Where's the Green Monster?"

Theo snatches a piece of lettuce from Billy's plate and shreds it, laying a strip down where left field would be. He puts a tiny ketchup dot between it and the ketchup basepaths.

"What's that?" Billy asks, twisting his head to try to look at the plate from Theo's perspective.

"Manny," Theo says, grinning.

Billy snorts and reaches across, picking up a fry and turning the dot into a little line. "Manny sleeping in the outfield. Much more realistic."

"Oh, what _ever_." Billy immediately gets a smug, superior look on his face, which he does every time Theo says something that betrays his age. The trade-off, of course, is that Theo gets to feel like he's not as old and out-of-touch as Billy. "He can do whatever the hell he wants in the outfield. You'd love him on your team. Admit it."

Billy sits back and eats the French fry. "Dunno. I'd have to think about it."

"Manny fuckin' Ramirez. What's there to think about?"

"He hits well. Can't deny that. Hits for power. He doesn't walk quite as much as you'd want, though..."

"Oh, come _on_. We're not paying him to take walks!"

"No, you pay Youkilis for that, don't you?" Theo smiles a little, conceding the point, and Billy looks, if possible, even more smug. "Although if you want _us_ to pay Youkilis to take walks, that'd be fine by me. My point is that if you're paying _anyone_ as much money as you're paying Manny, he'd fucking better walk as well as he hits. It's a simple costs-benefits problem. You have to figure out how much Manny costs, dollar-wise, and what the market value of his hitting ability is, and whether everything else, his non-walks and his shitty defense and his ability to completely fucking ignore normalcy, you figure out if those outweigh the benefits of paying him all that money just to swing his bat or not. Here..." Billy pulls a pen out of his pocket and starts writing lists of numbers down on a napkin. Theo doesn't know whether he should be impressed or disturbed that Billy's got most of Manny's stats for the past couple of years memorized.

"That's OK, Billy, really." Theo puts a hand on the napkin and Billy looks up. "You're not here for _work_. He's worth it for us, we've already determined that. I was just saying. You know. Like. Hypothetical."

"This isn't work," Billy says, frowning a little. "This is what I do."

Theo rolls his eyes for what feels like the 5000th time since Billy got to Boston. It's only been a day. "Baseball isn't life, man."

Billy folds up the napkin and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket. "'Course not. But it's what life goes around."

That's bullshit, Theo knows, but he doesn't say so out loud. He's not going to buy into Billy's fucked-up world view, but it's not really his place to shatter it either. He raises a hand to signal for the check.

"Was everything all right, Mr. Epstein?" the waitress asks, and Theo can tell that she's been waiting the whole time they've been here to admit that she recognized him. He sighs inwardly, assures her it was, and signs a menu for her boyfriend.

"Cheers," Billy sings quietly, pulling his big down jacket over his shoulders as they walk out, "where everybody knows your name." Theo punches him lightly in the arm, just to see Billy grin that crazy unbalanced grin of his, and directs their steps to the Public Garden. It's too cold for the swan boats, but he figures he can at least show Billy the bronze ducklings, their heads worn smooth from hundreds of thousands of passing hands, and very much a part of Boston.

\----

Although he did try his best to clear his schedule, it's just not possible, not the winter after a World Series, and Theo has to go into work the fourth day Billy's in town. They've been thinking about pitching since before the champagne even finished dripping off the clubhouse ceiling in St. Louis, and Theo's meeting with the owners to discuss David Wells' contract, which they're still hashing out.

His apartment is silent as he leaves, the door to the guest room firmly shut. He makes coffee and moves as quietly as he can in his socks. In Oakland, he knows, Billy tends to go to bed late and wake up early, calling Theo at both ends of the spectrum, but here in Boston Billy seems to sleep as late as possible every day, emerging from his bedroom blinking and yawning when Theo sits down to lunch. Theo had tried asking him about it but Billy had just shrugged, said something vague about relaxing vacations.

Billy doesn't seem particularly relaxed to Theo, more doggedly determined to enjoy his time off. He's also slightly grim, like he knows it won't last and he'll have to go back to something dreadful soon enough. Theo tries to not think about that too hard, because he gets the feeling that if he starts trying to take on the stress of Billy's life on top of the stress of running the Red Sox, he'll probably lose his mind. It's good, he thinks, heading out the door, to give Billy some time to himself today, and to concentrate on his own work for a little while.

Larry Lucchino still has close ties to the front office in San Diego, which has made the David Wells conversations interesting, if not necessarily easier. He lays out all the information he's been able to glean from his friends on the west coast. John Henry adds in the information they've gotten from Wells' agent. Tom Werner lays out their budget and the amount of money they're willing to spend on this one roster spot.

Theo's assistants fill in the rest, going over Wells' stats for the past few years, his projected numbers for the near future, his injury history and risks, his personality and attitude. They've done a lot of research and Theo is pleased with them, smiling and nodding at each one as they make their presentations, although to his vast annoyance Lucchino keeps interrupting and acting like his San Diego anecdotal information is somehow more important.

The meeting ends with a tentative contract set for Wells and a screaming match between Theo and Lucchino, the sounds reverberating off the walls, making tapeball thumps seem tiny and innocent in comparison. Theo accuses Lucchino of undermining him as a GM, Lucchino accuses Theo of being a spoiled brat who doesn't respect his position in the organization. Henry tries ineffectually to make peace while the assistants watch with wide eyes and Werner, who hates spotlights and conflicts, looks like he's trying to silently die or turn invisible on the spot through sheer willpower.

Theo slams his apartment door a little harder than he'd intended when he gets home. Billy looks over the back of the couch at him, a question dying on his lips as his mouth opens and fails to close up again. He just sits there, jaw slack, staring at Theo.

"What?" Theo's in no mood for staring.

"Wow," Billy says, pushing up and over the back of the couch in an ungainly vault. He walks up to Theo, moving forward until Theo has to move back, until Billy's got him backed up against the door and Billy's close enough to reach out and take the edge of Theo's collar between his thumb and forefingers. He rubs it. "Wow," he says again, more quietly.

Theo takes two deep breaths to calm himself down and tell himself that Billy is not Lucchino, and that yelling at the one will have absolutely no effect on the other. "Billy. _What?_ "

"I like this shirt." Billy now has both hands on Theo's collar, tugging the crisply pointed ends a little and staring down at Theo's throat, which is exposed because Theo's not the kind of general manager who wears a tie unless he absolutely has to do so.

"What, you've never seen me in a shirt like this before?"

" _Usually_ you're wearing those sweaters and looking all _schoolboy_." Theo rolls his eyes. Trust Billy to make him out to be some kind of jailbait. It's not strictly true, anyways: he wears suits and ties when the occasion calls for it, and half his wardrobe is made up of collared shirts. Billy is staring fixedly at him, though, like he's never seen Theo before, and Theo isn't sure if he should be amused or concerned.

Both, he decides. With Billy and warring feelings, the answer is usually 'both', or 'all of the above'.

Billy drops a hand to the top button of Theo's shirt, fingering it idly, and he somehow manages to make even that look obscene. "I told you 'bout those impulses I get, yeah?"

"Only a couple hundred times by now."

Billy's fingers slip around the button on Theo's collar almost as though they're working on their own, like Billy's not even thinking about it. "Think I'm getting' one of those impulses right now," Billy mutters. He tugs hard on Theo's shirt, and the button seems to pop free of its own accord.

"Why?" Theo inhales deeply and notes the way that Billy's eyes stick to his chest with interest. Is that a thing? Do guys who are into guys check out male chests the way Theo checks out female chests? Or is it just Billy? He files it away for later.

"You expect you can come storming in here, all mad like that, wearing your fucking good boy clothes, and I _won't_ get those impulses?"

Mad. That was it, that was the key. It was the fact that Theo came in looking like he wanted to kill someone that had driven everything else from Billy's mind. "Nice to know you're so twisted," Theo says, only half teasing.

"Ain't exactly hiding it." Billy hooks a finger into the gap of Theo's collar and tugs it away from Theo's throat. "I'm assuming that if you haven't kneed me in the nuts yet you're OK with this. Now would be a good time to say if that's not quite accurate."

Theo bites his lip and looks down at the finger curled into his shirt. "I'm not exactly OK with it," he says, as honestly as he can, "but I'm not exactly not-OK with it either."

The truth is that he's been simultaneously waiting for and dreading this moment ever since Billy called him up asking if he knew a place to stay in Boston. He's surprised that Billy's managed to restrain himself as long as he has, and he's been carrying a ball of nervous anticipation around in the pit of his stomach every day that Billy's been here.

" _The_ most infuriating kid on the planet," Billy mutters, fingers working down the row of buttons fronting Theo's shirt with single-minded purpose now. "You ever done this before?"

"Done what? Been with a guy? Other than the time you jammed a hand down my pants and leg-fucked me? No."

"Oh, yeah. Well. Sorry 'bout that." Billy pushes Theo's shirt off his shoulders and tugs the tshirt he was wearing underneath out of his pants easily. He presses a cold palm to Theo's stomach and cuts his eyes up to gauge his reaction, anything but sorry. "You don't look as freaked out this time."

Theo wraps a hand around Billy's wrist, the pulse jumping there belying the calm control of Billy's voice. Billy balls his hand into a fist and slowly kneads his knuckles into Theo's stomach, right into the knot he's been carrying around, and Theo's not sure if he's going to throw up or scream or ever get the look Billy's giving him out of his memory.

\----

"I wanna fuck you," Billy says, voice hoarse and taut around the edges, like his vocal cords are strung violin-string tight. Theo looks down with an effort. It's real, real hard to say no to Billy when he's on his knees, hands planted against the door on either side of Theo's pelvis, lower lip swollen with the little muscles on either side of his jaw jumping. And yet.

"No."

"You're a real cocktease, kid, you know that?" Billy shifts and slides a hand up the inside of one of Theo's thighs, making Theo feel like he's standing on uncertain rubber.

"No. I haven't. We're not doing that. OK. No." Maybe it's his ability to say 'no' in the face of overwhelming opposition that makes him such a good GM, the kind of GM who could trade away Nomar and the kind of GM who can deny anything to a moderately skilled but very enthusiastic giver of blowjobs.

Billy leans in and licks the head of Theo's cock slowly, looking up, twisting his tongue dirtily when he's sure that Theo's watching. He blows gently across the line of saliva laid down there and Theo's hips twitch involuntarily.

"Who," he manages to grind out, pushing his hips at Billy's face for emphasis, "is the cocktease here?"

"You're the one who can't decide if he wants to get it on or not."

Theo curls his fingers in the hair at the top of Billy's head. He has decided that he likes the gray mixed in with the brown, and he has also decided that he is not going to think about what, if anything, that means. He twitches his hips, deliberately this time, letting his cock rub against Billy's cheek, no way Billy can ignore how hard he is. "Do I really look ambivalent about this?" Billy grins up at him, all tooth. He has to close his eyes, lean his head back against the door and take a couple of deep breaths before he's able to say anything more. "It's not like I object to putting my dick _into_ things. Just not sure I'm too. Uh. Psyched about having dicks put into _me_."

"Mmmm." Billy strokes a fingertip up and down the crease between Theo's leg and hip. "It'll be fun, I promise. Y'know, I've always wanted to fuck a clean-cut kid like you."

This is just too much, and even with Billy's fingernail drawing a clean white line up his thigh, Theo has to bark out a short laugh. "Billy, I'm 31 years old. I think you're gonna hafta quit playing your dirty schoolboy fantasies out on me."

"Oh, but you seem so young." Billy anchors both his hands on Theo's hipbones and hauls himself upright. "So tender. Almost illegal."

"Outta your mind. Over _thirty_!"

"You don't look a day over 21." Billy leans in and bites at the side of Theo's neck. Theo thinks, knows he should probably be appalled, but really this just seems like another bit of strange and essential Billy-ness, and it doesn't bother him nearly as much as it should. He's used to Billy by now, like he got gradually inoculated over the phone to the reams of borderline genius and wildly inappropriate things that Billy does over the course of a typical day.

Theo shuffles a little against the door until he's straddling one of Billy's thighs. He rubs up against it, moving slow, mindful of the denim. Billy looks up from Theo's neck to stare at him with an intensity that, coming from anyone else, would be terrifying. It's terrifying coming from Billy too, but at least, coming from Billy, it's just par for the course.

"You ever been fucked?" Theo asks, part rhetorical and part honest curiosity, the same way he'd be interested in asking if Billy ever stole home when he was in high school or if he ever fucked any of his minor league teammates.

Billy lets his grin thin out, voice lowering conspiratorially. "Please, kid. You get to be my age, and you've done most everything once." He flexes the leg rubbing up against Theo, threatening denim-burn in delicate places. "Hell, you get to be my age and you've done some of those things more'n once."

"Maybe we'll do that, then. Sometime."

Billy reaches down and undoes his own fly, hips squirming to shake his jeans off at the same time. "Maybe," he says. "If I don't die from your cockteasery first."

" _You_ die? _I'm_ the one with a hard-on the size of..." Billy gets his cock out of his pants and Theo has to swallow the rest of his sentence, because it is evident that he is not the only one suffering in that particular way. He wouldn't have guessed that putting mouth to penis could get the guy supplying the mouth that excited, but Billy is proving him wrong.

This is the first time he's seen Billy like this; in the hotel Billy never even got his pants off, and he can't help but stare. Billy's not any bigger than him, maybe even a little smaller, but he seems so much larger simply by virtue of the fact that Theo hasn't seen another guy like this since... well, since he can remember, anyways, if ever.

"It won't bite," Billy mutters, probably amused at the way Theo's eyes have widened. He wraps a hand around the back of Theo's neck and thumbs the hair at the base of his skull. "Promise." He leans forward and angles his hips so that his cock rubs up against Theo's, trapped between their stomachs, and groans so low in his throat that Theo can feel the vibration of it in his own chest.

Rubbing himself against another guy is completely unlike anything Theo's experienced before. It's not like sex, it's not like a blowjob, and it's not quite like a handjob either. It reminds him a little bit of one time in high school when he had gotten himself off by humping the thigh of a girlfriend insistent on virginity, but at the same time it's nothing like that. The sensation of another cock pressed against his own is wholly new, and there's nothing at _all_ virginal about Billy.

Billy pushes him against the door, grinding his hips into Theo and doing something wet to the side of his neck. Eventually Theo realizes that the slurping is interspersed with words, short low groans of "fuck yes" and "god, kid" and "been waiting forever for this."

"Yeah," Theo breathes, barely able to get even that word out with the weight of Billy against his chest. The idea that Billy has been _waiting_ for this, been waiting to get Theo naked and squirming underneath him, is not really something he can deal with right now. He closes his eyes and forces himself to relax a little, letting Billy hold him up, giving himself up to the assault of sensations that Billy is releasing in his direction. The entire front of his body feels like it's on fire, like if his cock heats up one more degree it's going to burst into flame.

"Oh fuck," Billy mutters, his hips jerking spasmodically. He reaches down and grabs Theo's cock, aligning it more firmly with his own. The sweat between them is enough to keep the hard friction from being too painful, but only barely. Theo hisses a little, which just makes Billy tighten his grip.

Billy's hands are big, bigger than a woman's, bigger than Theo's, and the calluses on his fingertips and the heel of his hand are another thing Theo has never felt before. His cock is pressed between Billy's cock on one side, Billy's rough hand on the other, heat all around. All the feeling in Theo's body is gone to that one spot. Hardly anything else even exists.

Theo closes his eyes as tightly as he can, struggling to get enough air, enough contact, enough everything. On a sudden impulse he gets his arms around Billy's back and digs his fingers into Billy's shoulderblades, arching up as he does. Billy makes a sharp, loud noise and Theo feels like every muscle in his body contracts, curling him into Billy's grasp.

He's glad that he comes so hard on a couple of levels: it feels good, of course, but there's also the fact that by the time he gets his bearings again, Billy has already come too. Theo can pretend that the semen on his stomach is his alone, which makes it a lot easier to deal with. He's not so sure he's quite ready to see Billy coming _on_ him. Not just yet.

\----

One of the things Theo has his assistants do, during the slow points in the offseason, is work on the Catalog. The Catalog is a project personally dreamed up by Theo, and he's pretty sure that it is unique in all of baseball. What Theo's assistants are doing is looking up every trade, signing, or other move made by every GM. They're making a digital database of all this information, crosslinked and searchable. The idea is that if Theo is going to be dealing with, say, Mark Shapiro, he can go and look at the Catalog and from the data there he'll be able to see something useful about Shapiro's thought processes and tendencies. Advantage, presumably: Theo.

The Catalog isn't finished yet. It'll never be completely finished, of course, because new information has to be entered all the time and it will always be a living, breathing kind of database. The bare framework isn't completely done yet, though, so even that is still in the future.

The assistants haven't been entering information randomly: to keep the Catalog useful as it's being made, they're working from GM to GM, getting a big batch of information done for each manager before moving onto the next one. They have all the AL East general managers done, and, thanks to a specific request from Theo, Billy Beane.

Nobody's working on the Catalog right now, so Theo takes one of the jumpdrives that it lives on and plugs it into his desktop, the slight humming noise of his computer the only sound in the office. He opens it up and starts flipping idly through Billy's info.

A lot of it he knows already, of course, and the assistants have identified some trends and highlighted them. Theo pages through these, not looking for anything in particular, just killing time and checking on its progress. He has to be in his office anyway because he's waiting for a phone call from the Dodgers, and he wasn't about to give them his personal cell phone number.

The trends in Billy's moves as general manager are pretty consistent. He drafts or trades for cheap players, lets them run their value up, then lets them sign elsewhere for the compensatory picks or trades them for more good cheap players. He does this with everyone except for one player, a fact which Theo's assistants have duly noted and highlighted. The player is Eric Chavez.

Theo searches for Chavez under Billy's heading, pleased by how immediately the Catalog responds with the appropriate information. He looks at the numbers. The A's drafted Chavez and let him develop on their team, which is normal Billy behavior. But early in 2004 the A's signed Chavez to a big six-year contract, which does _not_ seem like normal Billy behavior.

Theo checks the numbers again. Chavez had good seasons in 2002 and 2003; slugged over .500 both seasons, won his second and third Gold Gloves, and was still only 25 at the end of '03. His trade value would have been very high. Billy would have been able to get all kinds of players in return for him, and to retain him would be expensive... _had_ been expensive, since $11 million a year might not seem like much to Theo, but was almost an unthinkable amount for the A's. One of the assistants has noted that it was the largest contract in franchise history, a fact that stands out starkly to Theo now, as it had probably stood out to the assistant.

Billy, following his usual policies, should have traded Chavez at the peak of his value. Instead, he violated his own rules and spent money that he wouldn't spend on any other player.

Theo clicks back to the opening Billy Beane page, where the assistants have highlighted the most interesting trends and trend violations. Chavez is there at the top of the list. Just below him is Zito, with a question mark, but this is because, while he's the only member of the Big 3 who hasn't been traded this winter, Billy might not really be holding onto him, just waiting until his contract runs out.

Keeping an eye on his office phone, Theo flips open his cell and dials Billy's number. He doesn't even have to go into the address book; he just tells his phone to dial the number of the last incoming call, and these days, more often than not, that takes him right back to Billy.

Although they often discuss baseball strategy, they don't share everything with one another. Theo still hasn't told Billy about the next big market he's trying to corner, of course, because to tell _anyone_ about that would be to defeat the purpose of getting there first. He doesn't, as a rule, talk to Billy about his farm system much, because he knows how deadly it is to talk about young, cheap players around Billy. He's sure there are plenty of things Billy hasn't told him about whatever it is that he's doing, or trying to do, with the A's. This Chavez thing, though, is so weird, so completely out of character that Theo feels he's allowed to call and ask about it.

"What?" Billy snaps, short and terse. Papers shuffle in the background, and there are dimly muffled noises on his end of the line, like Billy's not the only one in the Athletic's office today. He sounds busy, which Theo would feel worse about if Billy hadn't bothered him when he was busy too many times to count.

Theo hums a little, just to piss Billy off. He sits back in his chair and eyes the computer screen, the Catalog still glowing faintly at him. "So, what's the deal with Chavez?"

"Chavvy? What about him?" Theo has heard Billy get this tense before, usually when they're talking about Chavez or Zito or Billy's ex-wife or Billy's drinking or Billy's baseball career. Theo had assumed that these were just the things that caused Billy the most stress in his considerably stress-laden life, but Chavez is now seeming somehow more remarkable.

"You signed him," Theo says. He picks up a tapeball and runs a finger over its uneven surface.

"Yeah. He's a franchise player."

"I didn't think you _did_ franchise players and all that."

Billy grunts. "Exceptions to everything." Despite his shortness it's obvious that regardless of whatever was occupying his attention before, Theo has his full attention now.

"That doesn't seem like the kinda thing you would make an exception for. You could've gotten a _ton_ back for him if you'd traded him, Billy..."

"You think I don't know that? I'm pretty fuckin' aware of what Chavvy's worth, OK? But if we keep tradin' every player we have who gets good, how long do you think we can keep the fans coming to our shitty ballpark and eating our shitty hot dogs and buying our shitty tshirts?"

"So you're building an entire team around a third baseman?"

"Like that's weird?" Billy is starting to sound oddly defensive. "You had a team built around a fucking shortstop."

" _Had_. We're not doing that anymore." Theo is rather proud of this. "Doesn't work. Nomar was part of the problem, that whole theory of team-building was flawed. We're not built around any one player, and if I get my way we won't be for a good long time. We've got an outfielder in Manny and another outfielder in Johnny and a pitcher in Curt and we might have Pedro, and we've got a catcher in Tek and a DH in David, and you could call any one of 'em a player to build a team around." He pauses and knocks the tapeball across his desk, watching it rebound off his keyboard. "Seems like the kinda thing you would understand, Billy. Seems like the kinda thing you'd be doing on the A's. Which is why I ask about Chavez."

The soft sound that Theo has come to associate with Billy chewing on his lip drifts down the phone line. Billy doesn't say anything, and Theo leans back further, content to wait. He's got all afternoon, or at least until the Dodgers get in touch.

"I don't have your big Boston money to play with," Billy finally says. "I can't afford to go around signing a whole bunch of big names like you can. We had to show the fans they were gonna have _someone_ to root for year after year, and Chavvy's perfect."

"Oh, are you fucking serious? Are you seriously pulling the payroll pity card on me?"

Billy grunts again, growing more sullen.

"Billy," Theo says. "Billy. Come on now. Kevin Millar. Mark Bellhorn. Orlando Cabrera. Dave Roberts. Those weren't big names, and those are names people around here are gonna remember. Those guys were _central_."

"I know, OK? I know. Fuck." The phone whistles in Theo's ear as Billy exhales sharply. "Chavvy's just something I, we, had to do, OK? As a fucking business venture."

"I don't buy that."

"Not every move I make is gonna be ideal, OK? Sometimes I gotta do shit for the A's the business, not the A's the team."

Theo frowns at the tapeball. Billy seems sincere, but it just doesn't sound right. It doesn't sound like something Billy would agree to, ever. Oh, it does sound like something the owners would suggest, maybe even demand, but Theo is pretty sure that the A's have long since agreed to let Billy do whatever he wants within their budgetary constraints. The unusual autonomy is part of why Billy stayed on in Oakland.

"Was that all you called about? To harass me about how I'm running my team?"

Theo sighs. Trust Billy to get belligerent about something he does to Theo on a regular basis. "Basically, yeah. And I don't have a problem with how you're running your team, you know that. This just _doesn't_ sound like how you run your team."

"Drop it, kid," Billy says, his voice gone low and warning-gravelly.

"Why's it such a big deal? Does he have blackmail photos of you fucking a chicken or something?" Theo pauses to imagine that scene, and has to squeeze the tapeball to keep from laughing out loud.

"Ha ha. Very funny. Seriously, is that all you called about?"

"What, I need some kind of amazing reason to call you up?"

"Could have at _least_ called for phone sex," Billy grumbles, presumably trusting that anyone around his office will think he's joking with whoever's on the line. Theo glances at the clock and rolls his eyes to himself.

"At 3 pm? Not likely, Billy. Maybe in 8 or 9 hours."

"Oh, you gonna call later?"

" _Maybe_. You're changing the subject."

Billy sighs deeply. Theo imagines him running a hand back through his hair, in that exasperated way he does. "Yeah. I am. Just put the Chavvy thing outta your mind, OK? It's not something you need to worry your pretty little head about."

"Pretty?" Theo asks, equal parts amused and horrified, as usual. His office phone starts ringing. "Saved by the bell, you lucky asshole. DePodesta's on the other line, I gotta go."

"DePo's talking to you? What about?" Billy's gone from 0 to 60, distraught to keenly avid.

"Wouldn't _you_ like to know," Theo says, as snidely as he can, and hangs up on Billy's sputtering protests. He picks up the office phone and greets DePodesta, going to close out the Catalog as he does. The assistants haven't gotten to the National League GMs yet.

He pauses, though, his finger hovering over the mouse button, and clicks on the notes field instead. Years of multi-tasking make it easy for him to talk to DePodesta and write at the same time. "Look into the Chavez thing," he types, knowing that the next assistant to work on the Catalog will see the new entry and will start the ball rolling on the vast and far-reaching Red Sox information-gathering machine, a multi-armed affair that few escape once it's been targeted on them.

Using his big market resources against a small market team is resorting to dirty tactics, but it's all fair territory in baseball.

\----

Pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in mid-February. It's not exactly _spring_ at that point, but it's plenty warm in Fort Myers. Theo comes down to examine the pitchers, and to escape the bitter wind coming off the water in Boston. It does the fans good to see him walking around the training complex too; the year after a World Series victory, it's important to show everyone that you're not resting on your laurels.

John Henry is already here, since he keeps a house in Florida, but Werner isn't down yet, and neither is Lucchino. This suits Theo just fine. He's still smarting from his latest fight with Lucchino, not eager to reprise it any time soon. Spring Training is when work starts up again for his players and coaches, but the very beginning of it is maybe the closest thing to a vacation that he gets. By the middle of it he has to start paying attention to how guys are doing, so he can figure out who goes north with the team and who doesn't, but in these early days he can walk around the simple, unassuming fields, putting in his face time and letting the sunlight soak into his skin, the kind of thing he hasn't been able to do for months at home for fear of getting frostbite.

He's leaning against a wall, arms folded, watching Tim Wakefield warm up some fantastically slow knuckleballs, a perfect kind of pitch for a slow Florida morning. Nobody comes over to bother him. All he has to do is stand here and look like he's paying real close attention to whatever junk Wakefield's throwing. As though Wakefield's knuckler is going to need scrutiny. If there's anyone on the team who's guaranteed a roster spot, it's Wakefield.

Theo slouches against the wall, letting it warm his back through his shirt. In a few days most of the rest of the team will report, and he'll have to start worrying about who showed up in playing shape and who didn't. Then it'll be time to start worrying about when Manny is going to show up, which is traditionally some date after the official report time, on a day determined to be optimal by some fevered little corner of Manny's brain. Then he'll have to start actually paying attention to performance, talking to the coaches and trainers, meeting with Francona every night.

Not just yet, though. For now he can just soak in the fresh air, the sights and sounds of baseball being played. Being played by his guys. His team.

>  **April 2005:** Billy Beane signs a contract making him the A's GM through 2012, and giving him a small part of team ownership.
> 
>  **April 3, 2005:** The Boston Red Sox open the season with a 2-9 loss at New York (W: Randy Johnson, L: David Wells).
> 
>  **April 4: 2005:** The Oakland A's open the season with a 0-4 loss at Baltimore (W: Rodrigo Lopez, L: Barry Zito).

"What I really want to do is find the guys who made this schedule, and feed them to David Wells." Theo flops into the center of the hotel bed, letting the hand not holding the phone to his ear fling out to the far edges of the sheets.

"Happy Opening Day to you too." There's a thumping sound as Billy evidently does the same in his hotel.

Theo smiles a little, then immediately regrets it as his cheeks start to hurt. He's been smiling all day, photo op after photo op, and his face is sore. He rubs tentatively at his jaw. "Where are you again?"

"Baltimore," Billy says. "You're in New York. I know because I have eyes and ears and sometimes I watch sports news."

"Yeah. Coverage's been a bit. Much. And seriously. What kind of deranged mind thinks, 'Hmm, the Red Sox won their first World Series in a billion years last October, in the most dramatic fashion possible. Let's have them open next year by throwing them right into one of the most dramatic and heated rivalries in sports!' What a great idea!"

Billy makes a fake sympathetic noise at him. "Cry me a river, big market boy. I saw you on TV earlier, you looked good."

"It's early in the season. Not like it's hard to smile and say the right things yet."

"No, kid, I mean you looked _good_."

Theo squirms a little at the pleasantly warm sensation that floods his stomach. "Please don't tell me you jack off to Sportscenter."

"Nah. Too dangerous. There's always the chance that they'll be showing a clip of you, and right when I'm starting to have fun they'll cut to a clip of Schilling or something."

"There are some women in Boston who would _enjoy_ that."

"Are you telling me that tub of lard on stilts gets _action_? No, nevermind," Billy quickly adds. "Don't tell me. I don't want to know. I can understand the ladies of New England fantasizing about _you_ , but Mr. Horse's Ass Schilling?" There's a quiet noise, and Theo imagines Billy shuddering in exquisite disgust.

"He's a Red Sox player. You don't have to be Gabe Kapler to get ass if you're on this team."

"Gabe Kapler. Now you're talkin'."

Theo laughs, again immediately regretting it. "Ow. Man, Billy, you realize how gay you sound when you talk like that?"

"Please. Straight guys would go gay for Kapler."

"Billy," Theo says, all solemnity. "Would you like to fuck my reserve outfielder? I can make this happen. I have the power."

"Pimping out your own players. Disgusting." There's a slight squeak as Billy shifts position in his cheap Baltimore hotel bed. "Yet I expect no less from you. I bet you'd do it just so you could watch."

Theo shakes his head uselessly, not like Billy can see. "Nah. See, it'd be OK for _you_ to fuck him, since he's not on your team. If _I_ was involved, then it gets to be way unethical."

"Isn't this unethical?"

"Isn't what unethical?"

"You. Me. This."

"What is this?" Theo asks, his stomach curling a little again.

There's a pause, a shuffling sound. "Dunno," Billy answers. "It's the thing with you and me, where we talk on the phone and I grab my dick when I hear your voice."

Theo blinks. "Billy. Are you jacking off right now?"

"Maybe a little. Why? You aren't?"

"No," Theo says, truthfully. He isn't. He's still fully dressed, and his hands are both above his waist. He hadn't even been thinking about it.

"Impossible kid," Billy sighs. The sigh prolongs itself and tapers off in a breathy way that lets Theo know Billy hasn't stopped stroking himself.

"Oh, well, excuse me. I wasn't aware that bitching about Opening Day was sex talk." Theo is having a hell of a time keeping the painful smile from his face. Only Billy would find a way to get turned on by a conversation like this. 'Only Billy' is turning into the defining refrain of his life these days, the sheer number of uniquely freakish things that Billy does defying belief.

"Any time you talk," Billy growls, very very low and right near the mouthpiece of his phone, "is sex talk."

"Cheesy fucker."

"You're making it difficult, kid." Billy sighs dramatically. "I'm gonna soldier on, though. What're you wearing?"

Theo looks down at himself. "Are you serious? You're actually doing the textbook phone sex thing?"

"Humor an old man with a hard-on, willya?"

Now it's Theo's turn to sigh, and he does, not all that unhappily. "Jeans. Black collared shirt. White tshirt. Nothing special; same shit I was wearing earlier. Does that turn you on?"

"You could take 'em off," Billy says, hopefully. Theo rolls his eyes at the ceiling. Fingers his collar. He could just _tell_ Billy that he's taking off his clothes. Billy can't see him anyways. But that, he thinks, would be cheating. It would defeat the spirit of phone sex, or whatever it is that they're doing. And Billy might be able to tell from his voice anyways. For all he knows Billy is some kind of veteran expert at phone sex, and he can derive tiny nuances of sexual meaning from little fluctuations of verbal tone or some crazy shit like that.

He starts unbuttoning his shirt, shrugs it off his shoulders. "Tshirt and jeans now," he says, pleased with the way that Billy's breathing hitches slightly on the other end of the line. Excitement, he assumes, at the thought of Theo deciding to play along. "I'm gonna take the tshirt off, OK, I'm gonna hafta put the phone down for a second."

"Do what you gotta do," Billy says. His voice has roughened and there's a little scratching noise coming down the line. The mouthpiece of the phone, Theo thinks, shaking in Billy's hand, scratching against his cheek.

Theo puts his phone down on the bed and pulls his tshirt off, taking his time in folding it and his collared shirt neatly, setting them down in his little short-road-trip suitcase. Billy can wait a little bit. It'll probably do him good, ramp up his excitement with anticipation.

He picks up the phone again and settles back against the pillows. "OK. Shirt's off." He scratches his chest idly, thinking. "What're _you_ wearing?"

"Uh. Nothing special. You still got your pants on?"

"Billy. Fair is fair."

There's a long pause, and when Billy speaks again, it's a little sheepish. "Just a tshirt and boxers. Nothing special, OK."

"What pattern boxers? What kinda tshirt?"

"It's. Look, it's not important, OK, how about we just--"

"Billy."

"A's boxers, OK? Fucking bright yellow boxers with little green Athletic's A's all over them. That sexy enough for you?"

"Oh, I'm totally turned on by the fact that you're a huge fucking dork." Theo smirks down at his own stomach, the restrained smirk less painful to his sore cheek muscles than a full-on grin. "What about the shirt?"

There's a scrabbling sound, the phone dissolving into white noise before Billy's breath comes back. "Nothing. It's off now anyways."

"And you're, what, just jacking off there through the flap in your Oakland groupie boxers?"

"Yeah. I got my dick here, 'cause you got me hard already, and it's in my hand. Yeah. Are you still wearing your pants or what?"

"Uh huh," Theo says, looking down dubiously. He's not sure if he's up for this; it's kind of hot, hearing Billy talk like this, but at the same time it's kind of mortifying and awkward.

"Rub yourself through your jeans," Billy says, using the commanding tone of voice that Theo imagines he takes with assistants who are moving too slow, and on occasion with players. Theo's not entirely OK with being ordered around like that. And yet.

His free hand drifts down his stomach and stops between his legs, the denim scratchy under his fingertips, which seem hypersensitive, overly aware. He curves his fingers slightly and applies a little pressure, feeling the space defined by the zipper of his jeans become slightly more crowded. His breath hitches, only the tiniest bit, but of course Billy was listening for it, the pleased low hum on the other end of the line proof enough of that.

"You're gettin' hard, aren't you?" Billy says, real quiet, but loud as a trumpet-blast in Theo's ear. "You doing like I said?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me."

Theo swallows, trying to ease the dryness that's risen to his throat. He presses the heel of his palm against the top of the bulge in his jeans, his fingers fitting around the rest, fanning out downwards and squeezing. "Touching. Myself. Through my jeans."

"Details, kid. C'mon. I'm lying on this rank-ass Baltimore bed, I got my boxers hangin' open in the front with my dick stickin' out, I'm. Uh. I got my hand wrapped around it, um, I spit in my palm and I'm just pulling it up and down, thinkin' bout you. Something like that," Billy coaxes. "I wanna _see_ it. Like if you were here you'd see how red the head of my dick's getting', 'cause I'm so fucking hard right now, and you'd see how it looks against these retarded yellow boxers, all fucking wet from spit and I'm leakin' a little. Yeah. Kid. C'mon. Share."

"Jeez." Theo lets out a long, rattling breath, unaware that he'd been holding it. This is all way too weird for him, way too awkward, every bit as uncomfortably intense as Billy up close and in person. "I dunno if I can do phone sex, Billy."

"Just tell me what you're doing."

"Um." Theo looks down at his hand, like he's not entirely responsible for it. Totally Billy's fault. "Well. I'm, uh, I have my jeans on, so I'm, um, there's a. Like a bulge. And my hand is on it, and I'm kinda squeezing, 'cause that, uh, feels good."

"There you go. Does it feel so good you gotta keep the pants on?"

Theo snorts, tension breaking a little. "No, I could take 'em off. But I think you should make me really want to."

"Oh, a challenge. I see how it is." More bed-spring squeaks. Theo tries to imagine what position Billy's in on the bed, can't decide on one. "I gotta talk your pants off?"

"Yeah. Well, only if you're dead set on it."

"Fuck, kid, when _don't_ I want your pants off?" Billy's laugh, even over the phone, is dripping with subvocal desire on a level that Theo is entirely unaccustomed to, nothing he's experienced with any of the women he's dated. It makes him shiver, all up and down his spine and not something he would ever admit to Billy's face.

"OK," Billy says, "lemme see. If I was there, I'd start out by gettin' on top of you. Maybe I'd work you up some first, rubbing and shit, so when I get on top you're just starin' up at me with those big fuckin' eyes all crazy and lustin'. And then. Yeah, and then I'd smile down at you real big, so you could see how I was just waiting to decide where to bite you first."

Theo, alone in his hotel room, shivers harder. He can see Billy looming over him with that crazy over-toothed grin, his eyes flicking up and down along Theo's body, looking for the perfect piece of flesh in which to sink his canines.

"Right at the base of your neck, right where it meets your shoulder." Billy makes a small wet sound, like he's licking his lips at the thought. "Left side. I'll bite right there. Chomp my teeth in real good and hold on so you'll feel the bruise comin' up. And while I'm doing that, I'll take both my hands and rub 'em down your chest, down your stomach, 'til I'm tuggin' at your jeans."

Tilting his head to secure the phone between his ear and his shoulder, Theo rubs both his own hands down his chest, over his stomach, letting his fingers snag on his belt loops. He tugs downwards. The jeans hold firm on his hipbones, and he tugs harder, imagining Billy's impatience. "You shouldn't pull so hard," he says.

"Fuck that. Fuck the jeans." If Billy is surprised that Theo chimed in, he hides it very well. "Fucking jeans are keeping the fun stuff away from me. I'll tug 'em as fucking hard as I want to."

"God," Theo groans. He pulls on his belt loops again. "If you want 'em off you gotta undo the zipper."

"Yeah. I'll let go of your neck and wiggle down 'til I'm breathing on your zipper." Theo cups a hand around the bulge in his jeans again, letting his palm warm it, trying to capture the feeling of moist, hot breath there. "I'll bite that little fucking metal tab, pull it down with my fucking teeth, nice and slow."

Theo slowly pulls the zipper on his fly down, parting the metal tooth by tooth. "OK," he says, quiet as he can while still being heard. "You gonna take my pants off now?"

"I'll pull 'em down," Billy says, "but I decided I don't want 'em all the way off. I'll just pull 'em down to your ankles, leave your jeans and your boxers all bunched up over your feet so you're restrained down there and you couldn't run away even if you wanted to, 'though I _know_ you don't."

"Not really," Theo manages. "Should I be worrying, though?" He flicks open the button on his fly and pushes his jeans off his hips, fingers catching his boxers to take them along too, squirming them all down until they bunch at his ankles. He tries to move his feet apart and can only get them so far. He could walk with little shuffling steps if he had to, but he couldn't run. Just like Billy described.

"I wanna fuck you," Billy says, and this time Theo doesn't stop him. It's over the phone, he tells himself, and nothing as big as a penis is going to get into him this way. It's probably not a bad way to let Billy get this need, whatever it is, out of his system. "Can we do that?"

"How. How do we do that?"

"I tell you. And you, y'know. Whatever you got over there."

"I don't exactly have a, a dildo over here, Billy."

"Well, shit. Maybe you should."

"No thank you." Theo tries to imagine using something like that on himself, some lurid translucent oversized penis-simulacrum in purple or electric blue. It's not a pretty picture. His erection starts to flag a bit, and he reaches down to rub the head of it, keeping it interested.

"Then I guess you'd use your fingers. Unless you got some cucumbers or something."

"Cucumbers. Billy."

"It was the first thing I thought of, OK, what, like you got a better idea?"

" _Cucumbers_?"

"So I get your pants down," Billy says, loudly, obviously trying to get them back on track. "I'm gonna fuck you. I'm gonna crawl back up your body, bitin' the whole way, and I'll tell you to spread your knees, you can't move your feet that far apart so you're openin' 'em from the thighs." There's a pause, and when Billy's voice comes back it's shakier, less smooth. "I'll grab your thighs. Hold 'em down. Make you feel that deep stretch in your groin."

Theo lets his knees fall to the sides, opening him up. He strokes himself with one hand, pressing on one of his inner thighs with the other, knee to the bed, stretching the muscles of his groin pleasantly. "Yeah. I feel that." _Cucumbers_ , part of his mind thinks, but he suppresses it quickly. Phone sex. Hot. Hysterical laughter during phone sex, not hot.

"Good. I'll reach down, grab your cock, jack you off real hard and fast." Theo tightens his grip and speeds up. He breathes harder down the line, letting Billy know what he's doing, grateful that he's not being asked to spell it out. "Yeah, like that. Hard. 'Til you're squirming with it. And then spit on my other hand, I'll reach down with it and I'll rub your asshole with a finger. Just rub, in circles, and keep jackin' you so you hold your legs open for me like you're beggin' for it."

"Not likely," Theo mutters, but he keeps his hand moving fast up and down. This is not going to freak him out. He sucks briefly on his free index finger, wetly pulling it out, making sure his mouth is close to the mic on his phone so that Billy can hear.

He reaches down, past his cock, trying to keep his hand moving there. The angle is a little awkward, so he lifts his hips, hindered by his pants, but that's OK. It's more real, in a way. More like Billy's really there, directing the show. He rubs his damp fingertip in a circle around his asshole. It feels weird, and he almost loses the rhythm of his other hand.

"I'll jack you off 'til you're beggin' me to let you come," Billy says, oblivious and breathing raggedly down the line. "I'll shove a finger up your ass and you'll beg so hard you won't even be able to talk anymore. C'mon."

Theo presses his finger forward, not liking the resistance. "Wait. Billy, I need. Wait." Billy grunts. Theo tries to jump up and staggers, hindered by his pants. He swears at the hotel room in general, throwing out a hand to catch himself on the bedside desk. He hops over to his suitcase and digs around his toiletries. Finding nothing, he hops into the hotel bathroom, swearing under his breath, cock bouncing a little painfully, feeling utterly ridiculous. He hops back to the bed with a miniature bottle of hotel-brand moisturizer in his hand.

He flings himself back onto the bed, pulling his feet-pants-boxers back up and spreading his knees again. He props the phone between his shoulder and ear, opens the bottle. "Hey, Billy. You're a real asshole, you know that? This moisturizer smells like _almonds_."

"Who travels without lube?" Billy is incredulous, lube-less travel apparently an unimaginable thing in his world.

"People who aren't too concerned with fitting things up their own asses," Theo mutters, awkwardly glopping moisturizer into both palms. He flicks the bottle aside and rubs his hands, spreading the stuff around. The artificial smell of chemically-created almond scent fills the air, nearly overwhelming. When he reaches down to take hold of his cock again, though, it feels great, slick and warmed by his hands. He runs his hand up, tightening his fist over the head, everything sliding smoothly in a way that makes him lift his hips off the bed a little and sigh deeply.

"There y'go," Billy says in what he probably assumes is an encouraging tone. Really, Theo thinks, he just sounds predatory. Not that Theo particularly minds. "I'll open you up, then I'll shove my dick in, real slow so you feel every fuckin' inch."

Theo presses a finger back against himself, the tip sliding in easier with the lubrication. Just one finger, he thinks, I've done this before, it's like going to the doctor, only with an almondy erection in his hand and Billy on the phone panting like an overheated dog, frantically jerking off to the thought of replacing Theo's finger with his cock. Wow. OK. Not really like going to the doctor.

Billy's not saying anything now, just breathing hard down the line and making little grunting sounds. Theo pushes the finger in further and strokes himself faster, moisturizer easing the way for both. "Uh. _Fuck_ ," Billy says, and the Baltimore hotel bed squeaks in newly protesting ways. Billy's breathing stops for a long moment, then starts up again explosively.

 _Just came up my ass_ , Theo thinks, spreading his knees as much as he can and thrusting up into his fist. He imagines Billy on top of him, grunting and shining with sweat, gray and brown hair wild around his face, and that image turns into Billy in the middle of some plain hotel bed, sheets screwed up around him, coming hard all over his stomach and a pair of bright yellow A's boxers, phone clamped tight in his hand and Theo's name on his lips.

That image turns into Billy under Theo, gasping as Theo slams into him, his legs bent up and shaking against Theo's arms, and that's the image that Theo settles on. The finger in his ass comes out without a thought, trailing up to rub behind his balls briefly before moving aside to grab the sheets.

"C'mon kid," Billy says, and the breathlessness of Billy's voice, combined with the image in his head and the familiar tug on his cock, sends Theo crashing over the edge, his stomach tightening and his pelvic muscles jerking sharply, spattering his clenched fist and a bit of his stomach with white.

He collapses bonelessly to the bed, breathing like he just ran the Boston Marathon. "Well, shit," he manages to say, in the general direction of his cell phone where it lies, next to his head, and Billy's laughter, though distant, is rich and warm.

\----

The first win of 2005 comes in the third game. It's obnoxious to lose two games to the Yankees right off the bat, but Theo magnanimously decides to blame the schedule-makers for that, not his players.

In the third game Kevin Millar goes 3-for-3 before getting pulled in favor of a defensive substitution, and Theo feels vindicated, nudging Peter, who's standing next to him in their box. Peter rolls his eyes and taps at his Blackberry with a tiny penstick, marking off defensive out locations in the field according to a zone system the Red Sox have cooked up, the kind of thing not recorded in the official box score. It's a good idea, something that Peter read about and brought up himself with Theo. Theo likes surrounding himself with people who think creatively about baseball, who take initiative, and in this he is, he's aware, somewhat unusual. Him and Billy both.

Mariano Rivera blows the save spectacularly, giving up 5 runs and only getting 2 outs, helped along by an A-Rod error that puts Manny on base and scores Billy Mueller. Theo smiles grimly at the error. He knows that he shouldn't care more or less about any particular player, but after the whole trade mess with A-Rod, and then the fight with Varitek, and all the stunts he pulled last October, Theo isn't too fond of him and can't bring himself to feel guilty about it.

It's a nice high note on which to end the series, but they fly to Toronto next, and Theo knows there will be a crash-down effect where his players have to struggle to give a shit about the Blue Jays after the excitement of a Yankee series, knowing there's _another_ Yankee series coming up right after. One more thing to worry about, he thinks, running a hand through his hair as he steps out of the box and into the private hallway separating him from the rest of the ballpark.

He meets Brian Cashman, GM of the Yankees, right there in the hallway outside their adjacent boxes. They shake hands and Theo can't help thinking that Cashman looks terrible. Cashman has always been short and pale and kind of ratty-looking, but all that is now heightened by the bruise-colored bags starting to form under his eyes, the tired slump to his shoulders that makes it look like his thin shirt is weighing heavily on him. Theo instantly worries about his team less, just looking at Cashman.

"See you on the eleventh," Theo says. Cashman winces slightly and tries to cover it with a hasty attempt at a smile. Theo feels guilty; the 11th is the Red Sox home opener, and they're going to have all sorts of ceremonies, presentations, the raising of the World Series champions banner and things like that. It's going to be hell for the Yankees to watch. It's going to be extra-hellish for Cashman, who will have to spend the entire pre-game show slowly burning with the knowledge that his owner wants him dead for allowing this to happen.

That, of course, is completely irrational and not at all how baseball works-- it's not like Cashman _allowed_ the Red Sox to beat the Yankees, or had anything to do with them steamrolling the Cardinals-- but Theo knows that George Steinbrenner, the Yankee owner, will not see it that way. It might sound like hyperbole to someone else, because surely an owner wouldn't actually wish his GM _dead_ , but Theo's not so sure about Steinbrenner.

Steinbrenner has owned the Yankees for as long as Theo has been alive. Theo grew up a Red Sox fan, a little kid sticking his tongue out at the street whenever he saw a hat with that interlocking N and Y, and Steinbrenner has always been a kind of Big Bad Wolf figure to him.

A lot of what he thought about baseball and the Red Sox has changed between now and then, that little kid perspective morphed into something else, necessarily different when seen through the eyes of a newly World Series victorious general manager, but some things have stayed the same. The neon lights of the Citgo sign still help him orient to the city at night, Opening Day is still the beginning of a new year, the starting roster is still a litany he can recite in his sleep, and George Steinbrenner is still the Big Bad Wolf.

Theo has his own issues with the Red Sox owners, especially with Lucchino, but as he stands here in the hallway of Yankee Stadium, Cashman taking his hand back from Theo's grasp and sticking it in his pocket, shoulders rounding up, he's thankful.

"See you then," Cashman says, bobbing his head with a funny little motion, eyes cutting around to the sides, already checking his back, watching for media he can avoid.

Theo nods and turns back to his own people. His assistants are packing up their laptops, whipping out cell phones and Blackberries and hands-free headsets. Two old scouts, smart men who never let baseball stop them from thinking, the only type of scouts Theo still employs, are carrying Yankee Stadium beer into the hallway, arguing about Rivera's pitching motion, what it means. Theo looks at them all carefully, scanning faces and hands.

Some of them are stressed out: the travel secretary is already hollering into his phone, his assistant racing down to the clubhouse to make sure that Manny has his passport for the trip into Toronto; one of Theo's assistants can't get her Blackberry to connect to the internet and is cursing fluently; a reporter Theo vaguely recognizes as a new kid at the Globe has emerged from wherever the reporters go during the games and is edging towards Theo, undeterred by the two assistants who have also spotted him and are moving to head him off. Terry Francona is sick and in a hospital, and one of Theo's assistants is on the phone, getting the latest update, trying to see if Tito can be on the field by the time the Red Sox get back to Boston for their home opener.

Nobody, however, looks stressed out in the overdrawn, beaten-down way that Cashman does. Nobody looks like they've just undergone a round of torture on the rack or anything like that. It's normal early-season stress, normal baseball organization stress.

Theo's proud of his people, and, he thinks, they know that. The Red Sox front office is turning into a real team. It's not a top-down kind of organization run by one close-fisted man like in New York and, when he thinks about it, Oakland. Billy Beane is a step down from Steinbrenner, of course, and while Steinbrenner is irrationally old fashioned, Billy is rationally modern, but they both run their respective shows, can't stand anyone else taking the reins.

Peter walks next to Theo as they make their way out of Yankee Stadium, following the cops, who ignore them with professional Yankee-fan ease. He's reviewing the fielding data in his Blackberry.

"Anything good?" Theo asks, nodding at the little machine.

Peter taps the screen with the penstick. "Bernie's lost another step in the outfield, looks like."

Theo smiles and watches the shoulders of the cop nearest to them stiffen slightly. "That's not exactly news."

"I know." Peter smiles back thinly, more than he usually allows himself. He lowers his voice. "You might want to take a look at these numbers on Trot, though."

"In the car. You'll ride with me."

Peter nods and tucks his Blackberry back into his pocket. They walk out of Yankee Stadium in step, thick blue columns with white stripes flanking their path. When they get outside a subway train sits overhead, crackling slightly on the tracks. Theo glances up to catch a glimpse of the stadium-facing plexi windows, dirty and scratched and full of Yankee fans gawking down at him. He gives them a jaunty thumbs-up. The fans react immediately, unhear-able jeers and nasty hand gestures, all except for one little kid, probably 5 or 6, with his nose pressed up to the window, who smiles and waves.

Theo waves back, just before the train groans into life and clatters away. The kid's young, but he'll learn.

He looks back down to see one of the cops shaking his head. "Tryin' to incite a riot on us, Mr. Epstein?"

"Me? Incite a riot in New York?" Theo gives the cop his best wide-eyed and innocent expression, which happens to be _very_ good. The cop smiles, obviously in spite of himself, and holds the car door open for Theo. Peter slides in next to him, pulls his Blackberry back out, and is scrolling through Trot Nixon's defensive data before the car is even out of the Yankee Stadium parking lot.

>  **April 11, 2004:** The Boston Red Sox win their home opener 8-1 against New York (W: Tim Wakefield, L: Mike Mussina) and have their Championship ceremonies. The Oakland A's lose their home opener 3-10 against Toronto (W: Gustavo Chacin, L: Kirk Saarloos).

The home opener is perfect, just perfect. Tim Wakefield, who maybe deserves it more than anyone, gets the start and absolutely dominates, his knuckleball fluttering like something out of a batter's worst nightmare. Mussina melts down; Doug Mirabelli, of all people, hits a home run.

The pregame ceremony goes off without a hitch. Red Sox players from former years, former _decades_ come onto the field to raise the championship banner and shake hands and finally, finally, _finally_ celebrate a Red Sox World Series victory. Johnny Pesky, born in 1919, one year after the Red Sox had last won it, raises his hands in pure sublime joy, his thin face, sharp nose, grayed eyebrows pointed blissfully at the high clear Boston sky.

He's been a member of the Red Sox in one way or another for _63_ years, twice as long as Theo has been _alive_ , and it's just kind of unbelievable for Theo to see him there in the sun, here and now, with that kind of tottering, brilliant happiness. That's when it hits him, finally, for real, what he's done here. He was happy before, deliriously, amazingly happy, but he hasn't truly _felt_ it. Not in the clubhouse, with champagne in his hair, not the first time he put his hand on the cool metal base of the trophy, not when the crowd roared as the Duck Tour boat splashed into the Charles River during the victory parade. This, right here and now, is the first time that he feels the true enormity of it all.

The Yankees are watching from their dugout, clapping at the right times, and this is a classy move that Theo will commend them for later, even if he knows that Jeter had to put most of them up to it. On a little TV buried somewhere in the dark belly of the Oakland Coliseum, Billy is watching.

None of this matters right now. Theo watches Pesky hug David Ortiz, tears on both their faces, fat chunks of diamond-glitter on both their fingers, white shot through with red, the cut-ruby Bs on the surfaces of the rings. The elderly, slender infielder and the larger than life slugger, differences utterly melted away as both together heft the World Series trophy into the air, that air rent with unanimously blissful Boston cheers.

With everyone's eyes on the field, Theo allows himself a moment to look down and wipe his face with his sleeve. He looks back up and smiles as the ceremonies go on, tucking his arm behind his back so the cameras won't pick up on the wet smudges of tears.

\----

He has an A's game on, which he can do because of the time difference that makes 7 pm in Oakland 10 pm in Boston, his own game already over for the evening. The announcers are talking about an interview they did earlier that day, but Theo's only half paying attention. There's a pitching change and suddenly, hey! Billy's on TV. Theo looks up from his computer screen.

Billy's sitting in his office with a foot up on his knee. He's wearing a blue collared shirt and khakis and old-looking black sandals. The sandal up on his knee is closer to the camera than any other part of him, so it looks huge and nearly obscures his head. The camera makes little feinting motions to either side, but apparently there's no angle that keeps it on that side of the desk where Billy's foot is _not_ in the way.

Billy's droning on and on about team morale and Theo can't help but smile. The cameraman is probably annoyed and showing it. Billy must be aware of it; it's not the kind of thing he wouldn't notice. But of course Billy doesn't give a fuck. He's probably keeping his foot propped up there specifically to see the cameraman squirm.

The video camera focuses on various things around Billy's desk, making the best of a bad situation since Billy has positioned himself so slouchily and impossibly. There's a framed photo of a little girl, which Theo knows is the product of Billy's Last Great Attempt at Heterosexuality (failed); a scuffed baseball on a stand, which Theo guesses is the product of Billy's Last Great Attempt at Playing Baseball (failed); an opaque Oakland A's water bottle, which Theo assumes is Billy's Most Recent Attempt at Feigning Sobriety (probably failed); and a bobblehead of Barry Zito with a signature scrawled on the base in fat black marker. Given the theme of the rest of Billy's desk, Theo wonders what the bobblehead means.

The segment ends and the station cuts back to the game. Theo picks up his phone. Billy picks up on the third ring.

"Hey. Just saw you on TV."

Road noises. Billy's in his car, circling the stadium, keeping out of the ballpark so he doesn't go crazy watching the game. He is, so far as Theo knows, the only GM in baseball who behaves like this during games. "What, they showed that pre-recorded shit? They're that bored already, huh? What's the score? No, wait, don't tell me. No, wait, do. No, I don't wanna know."

"You looked good." Don't sound so good, Theo thinks, but he doesn't say it.

Billy pauses suspiciously. "I can't give you a phone quickie while I'm behind the wheel, kid, unless you wanna read about a, a messy California road catastrophe in the paper tomorrow morning."

"Not like _that_ , jeez. I just appreciated your rebellious sandal to the face of all things media."

"Nice touch, I thought."

"Very power to the people. Rock the boat. Fight the man."

"Rage against the machine." Billy honks at some probably-innocent driver who dared get near his car.

"Don't rage _with_ the machine," Theo says, torn between enjoyment of the banter and concern. "Tell me you haven't been drinking."

"Haven't been drinking."

"Tell me you haven't been drinking and have it be _true_."

He can almost hear Billy's shrug, patently ridiculous as that is. "I can tell you what you wanna hear, kid, but I can't do the impossible."

"Billy. You gotta get off the road before you get killed. Or you kill someone else." Theo runs his fingers nervously over his keyboard. Incentive, incentive. "You're setting a terrible example for the squad, you know that? What's the average age of players on your team, 22? Youngest team aside from the Devil Rays, pretty much? All those impressionable young minds, and you're out driving drunk?"

"Oh, my god, I'm pulling over. You're totally right. I mean, what if, like, Huston Street finds out I'm drinking? His little heart will be broken and he'll never pitch for me again, he's only 21 and I think he promised his virginity to Jesus. I'm pulling back into the lot, OK? God forbid I traumatize my fucking babies."

"Billy..."

"They're losing, aren't they? Chavvy struck out every time up, didn't he? The day that little shit learns how to consistently take a pitch is the day I become convinced in the existence of God."

"Billy, just pull over. _Please_." He cannot believe he has to even say this.

"Aw, well how can I say no when you go askin' all pretty like that?" There's a smattering of honking, and then the road sounds die away until Theo can't hear any other cars, just the gentle purring of Billy's own car engine. "I'm back at the Coliseum. I'll be fucked before I go in there, though."

Theo heaves a sigh of relief, pinching the bridge of his nose tightly and tilting his head back to the ceiling. "You don't have to go inside. You just needed to get off the road. Billy, you really can't drink and drive, OK? I'll call the cops next time. I totally will."

"You wouldn't."

"I fucking would." Theo sits forward, slowly filling with a rage so big he can't contain it. "Are you out of your fucking mind? I'd rather see you smeared up and down each and every ESPN channel than hear about you getting killed because you drove your fucked-up ass off the side of the road."

"Even ESPN News? No one even watches that one, man, that's stone cold harsh." Theo growls inarticulately, and Billy's voice changes, puffs up and bristles in a way that's partly the fault of the alcohol and partly regular old Billy-ness. "Since when do you lecture me anyhow?"

"Since right fucking now." Theo tries to send as much of his anger down the phoneline as he can. How dare Billy toy with his life like that? How dare he toy with _Theo's_ life like that? "I mean, what the fuck is wrong with you? Who has a few drinks and then goes for a highway joyride? You're old enough to know better."

"You know who you sound like?" Billy's voice slurs a little bit, and Theo realizes that Billy's even more drunk than he had thought, a concept so terrifying-- Billy, not just tipsy but _honestly drunk_ on the roads-- that his mind immediately skitters away from it. "You sound like fuckin' Chavvy. All 'responsible' this and 'you need help' that and basically Mr. Mom all over my ass."

"Oh, your third baseman knows about your drinking problem? Real professional, Billy."

"Says the kid who's fucking a rival GM. When it comes to professional, you don't got a leg to stand on." Theo hangs up at that.

It's not like he _forgets_ that Billy is the GM of the A's; given the amount of baseball talk they engage in on a regular basis, that would be pretty much impossible. But he does sometimes forget that it's something he really, _really_ shouldn't be doing.

>  **May 9-11, 2005** The Oakland A's play in Boston and lose all 3 games-- 5-13, W: Tim Wakefield, L: Dan Haren; 2-3, W: Matt Mantei, L: Octavio Dotel; 5-6, W: Keith Foulke, L: Octavio Dotel.
> 
>  **May 16-18, 2005:** The Boston Red Sox play in Oakland and lose 2 out of the 3 games-- 4-6, W: Keichi Yabu, L: Mike Myers; 7-5, W: Alan Embree, L: Juan Cruz; 6-13, W: Seth Etherton, L: David Wells.
> 
>  **June 7, 2005:** The Oakland A's select Travis Buck and Cliff Pennington in the first round of the amateur draft. The Boston Red Sox select Jacoby Ellsbury, Craig Hansen, and Clay Buchholz in the first round of the amateur draft.
> 
>  **June 10, 2005:** The Boston Red Sox play the Chicago Cubs in Chicago and lose 6-14, W: Greg Maddux, L: Bronson Arroyo.
> 
>  **July 13, 2005:** The Oakland Athletics trade Eric Byrnes and Omar Quintanilla to the Colorado Rockies for Joe Kennedy and Jay Witasick.

They first come to Oakland in May, and Theo travels with the team. Nothing unusual in that; he doesn't come on every road trip, but he tags along often enough that his presence on the team plane goes more or less unremarked. Schilling sits down next to him and spends 3 hours arguing about politics (Theo, staunchly liberal, always treats Schilling's firm republican convictions nervously, like they could explode all over him if poked), but otherwise nobody even seems to notice that he's on board.

He gets off the plane dopey with jet lag, but when he finally sheds his business-casual travel clothes and crawls into the hotel bed, he realizes that he can't sleep. The exhaustion runs too deep, right through tired and back out the other side again, leaving him a hollow, jittery kind of pseudo-awake. He gives up, puts on a pot of coffee in the little 4-cup model provided with his suite, and calls Billy.

Billy takes a while to pick up, long enough for Theo to extract a mug's-worth of coffee from the pot and settle himself, legs crossed, on the bed. He's barefoot and shirtless, just wearing old gray sweatpants with YALE printed in faded navy down the sides, but the hotel room is so thoroughly climate-controlled that it's comfortable. The phone rings and rings and rings in his ear, but he knows by now that Billy's voicemail is set on some ridiculous delay.

"Hey," Billy says, just before Theo probably would have started thinking about hanging up.

"Hey. I'm in Oakland."

"Oh." Billy doesn't sound enthused, or excited, or anything. Theo frowns.

"No, 'oh, awesome, now that you're here and so jet-lagged you can't even think about sleep, we can have amazing hot sex in my apartment all night long'?"

This, at least, gets a snort from Billy. "I wouldn't say no to that. But I'll hafta take a rain check."

"Hey. C'mon. I haven't been around Oakland, how 'bout you show me around, do all the touristy stuff?"

"Kid. You're talking about _Oakland_. There ain't no touristy stuff. You see the Coliseum, you've pretty much seen it all."

"Well, what the hell, Billy?" Theo knows that some petulance, some hurt is coming through in his voice, and he hates it because he knows it makes him sound weak, but he would have to be at the absolute top of his game to modulate the irritation he's feeling, and right now, running hours ahead, he's in no kind of shape for dealing with Billy being whatever it is that Billy's being.

"I'm not in town right now, kid. I'm in," the slightest of hesitations, "Denver."

Theo blinks down into his coffee, wondering if he heard that correctly, if maybe his jet lag is playing tricks on his ears. "You knew Boston was gonna be in town this week. And that's, that's a National League city."

"Yeah, I know." There's a sighing noise and a slight rustle, Billy combing through his hair with his fingers, the gesture so familiar that Theo can close his eyes and see it. "We're trying to... well, we're trying to get something done, shit came up, I hadda be on scene, I'm sorry."

"Who?"

"C'mon, kid, you know I can't tell you that."

"Billy." He's pouting. He can feel it on his voice. Billy can almost certainly hear it.

Billy sighs again. "Well, shit. Now I feel all bad that you dragged your sweet little ass all the way out to fucking Oakland and I'm not even there."

Theo downs most of his coffee in one long draught, swallowing repeatedly. He sets the mug down on the little table next to his bed. Stretches his back without moving his legs from their comfortably folded position.

"Arright, aright, I get it," Billy grumbles. "I'm an ass."

"You couldn't've put off this trip for a few days?" Theo is pretty sure that Billy could, if he really wanted to. Billy's good at getting people to let him do stuff like that.

Billy doesn't say anything, which is as good as a confirmation.

"OK," Theo says. "I guess I'll talk to you later."

"Trust me, your hotel room is nicer than my apartment, kid." Billy's voice is a little bit bitter, a little bit grimly joking.

Theo exhales sharply, exasperated. "Like I give a shit what your apartment looks like. I'd like to see _you_ , Billy, since, y'know, we practically never see each other."

"Oh." There's a long silence, during which Theo listens to Billy breathing. His breath sounds fast, and Theo can't tell if that's some artifact of the phone connection, or because Billy's at high altitude there in Colorado, or if Billy's panickingly upset or something.

"I gotta go," Billy says, after a while. "I'll. Yeah, for sure I'll talk to you later. And, kid..."

"What?"

"Eric Byrnes." Billy hangs up.

Theo stares at his phone, the little screen vibrating with the coffee racing through his bloodstream. Billy's trying to do something with Eric Byrnes and the Rockies. This is interesting, useful information, and Billy absolutely, 100% should not have told him. Theo's hands start to shake, and he's not sure it's entirely because of the caffeine.

\----

The Command Center is a room buried in the maze of offices under Fenway Park. It has no windows, but it's hooked into more TV and phone lines than anyone could ever need. It's the one place in the ballpark where the wireless internet is guaranteed to not go out (even Theo has to keep a long cord handy in his office, because half the time his laptop can't get service there). Sockets ring the walls at just the right height for a bulky phone or computer charger.

There's no big, shiny wooden table, like in the conference rooms upstairs. The table in the Command Center is scuffed plastic in a purposefully unremarkable shade of gray, although here and there various Red Sox personnel have doodled on it. The stretch of table in front of Theo's seat sports a pretty good cartoon of Curt Schilling eating a microphone.

The speakerphone in the middle of the table crackles, and everyone leans forward a little, almost unconscious, heads tilting in to hear it better.

"June 7. This is the 2005 Amateur Players Draft. We'll start with roll to make sure everyone's here." The speakerphone starts crackling with different frequencies as each team checks in, affirming that they're connected to the conference call. Theo loves draft day. It's so charmingly lo-tech.

Whiteboards are set up around the room, just like the Winter Meetings but with more scouts, more guesswork involved with the younger players, and tempers accordingly shorter. Theo eyes the big list of players that they're trying to get. He _really_ wants his first choice to fall through to him; it's a pretty good draft class, this year, and they've chosen their first pick with that in mind. In another year, he might not last to the 23rd spot, not with the kinds of numbers he put up in college.

"With the first pick of the 2005 draft," the moderator's voice says, clear through the light static, "the Arizona Diamondbacks select Justin Upton, shortstop, Great Bridge High School. The Kansas City Royals are on the clock."

There's a collective sigh of relief in the Command Center. Upton is good, but the Red Sox had barely even scouted him, because you have to be realistic about who's going to still be on the board when your turn comes around, and there's no sense in fretting about players you haven't got a chance at. Lucchino had taught Theo that.

The Royals take Alex Gordon, the Mariners Jeffrey Clement, and the Nationals take Ryan Zimmerman. The Brewers take Ryan Braun out of the University of Miami, and, in the corner of the Command Center, Peter swears softly. Braun's numbers had been pretty attractive, and some of Theo's assistants had been pushing fairly hard for him. "Stick to the board, people," Theo says, quietly, but loud enough to carry in the tense room, and everyone relaxes a fraction at the reminder.

More teams make their picks. The first block were mostly college kids, but the Tigers take Cameron Maybin, and after that it's mostly high schoolers, which makes everyone look around and smirk at each other. College students, though older, are still a better statistical bet than high schoolers. It's been proven time and time again, and the fact that most Major League teams still refused to believe it never fails to delight Theo. He knows that the same exact smugly amused scene is going on in some small, messy room in the Coliseum, and this makes him smile even more. Sure enough, when it's Oakland's turn, an unfamiliar voice, one of Billy's interchangeable assistants, comes over the line and selects Cliff Pennington, from Texas A & M, a college boy.

The Marlins take Alex Thompson, another high schooler, and finally the Red Sox have their first pick. Theo looks at the board again, just to be sure, but already one of his assistants is leaning in to click on the speakerphone and read off the name. They're going to get their man.

The moderator listens, approves the selection, and turns the 'phone on his end back to general broadcast. "With the 23rd pick, the Boston Red Sox select Jacoby Ellsbury, outfield, Oregon State University. The Houston Astros are on the clock."

Theo sits back with a sigh of relief, feeling rather than seeing everyone else do the same. A couple of the younger assistants high-five each other. He smiles, feeling indulgent, and glances at the board again. They have another pick this round, the 28th, and then 3 picks in the supplemental first round. There are a few pitchers on the whiteboard, all of whom the Red Sox have decided they want. The Astros pick, and the Twins are on the clock. People start looking at Theo again.

What, he thinks, would Billy do here? Truthfully, he doesn't have to think very hard to know exactly what Billy would do. He would look at the board, pick his favorite player based on some secret Billy-algorithm, rank the others behind him, and call out the order he wanted them selected quickly, loudly, decisively. No one in whatever passed for a command center in Oakland would have any doubt about who was running their draft, and that would be just how Billy liked it.

The Twins take some Fresno kid named Matt Garza, and the Red Sox are on the clock. Theo looks around the Command Center, at the scouts with their piles of notebooks, at the young men and women watching him over the screens of their laptops, at John Henry leaning on a wall and Larry Lucchino eyeing Theo narrowly from the other end of the table. Werner, he knows, is somewhere else in the ballpark, hiding from the stress of being on-scene.

They have 5 minutes. "Open floor," Theo says. "Tell me what order we should draft these guys in, and make it quick."

They take Craig Hansen near the end of the first round, then Clay Buchholz and Jed Lowrie in the supplemental, all of them college kids. They finally take a high schooler, Michael Bowden, with their last supplemental pick, just for the hell of it. Some of the older personnel are starting to high-five each other, and Theo can't stop his smile from growing wider.

The first round ends with a soft cheer in the Command Center. Lucchino stares Theo down until Theo looks right back at him. "OK," Lucchino says, nodding once, before stretching, standing up, and wandering out of the room.

A warm, fuzzy feeling grips Theo's stomach, all out of proportion to the gesture. Already half his team is starting to fix the boards and get them ready for the second round. The other half is starting to argue over roster assignments for the minor leagues. They're all, so far as Theo can tell, excited and involved, and as the speakerphone crackles into life again, he just can't stop grinning.

\----

His happiness over the draft lasts until late the next night. The draft had ended two hours before, having stopped at midnight on the previous day. Most GMs, he knows, don't bother to stick around the for the whole thing, leaving the later rounds to their people, but Theo's never been one for making his assistants do something he himself isn't willing to do.

He's just collapsing into his bed when his phone rings. He groans and presses a hand to his forehead, _15 hours of working the draft_ and some moron is actually calling him. If it's someone from his front office, he's going to kill them with his bare hands.

He picks up regardless, because he always picks up-- what if it's an emergency?

"You're an asshole," Billy says, and Theo groans again; he really needs to stop always answering his phone. "No," Billy adds, catching the groan, "you listen to me, you asshole."

"You listen to _me_!" Theo finishes collapsing onto his bed, but still manages to hang onto his phone. "I just spent the last two days of my life trying to extract the fucking meaning of the universe from the statistics of kids not even old enough to drink, I am _not_ in the mood for anything right now except for sleep and maybe, oh, I don't know, congratulations Theo on your excellent draft, I'm very proud of you, you've done so well!"

"Clay Buchholz? Jacoby Ellsbury? Thanks a _lot_ , cocksucker, like I'm gonna congratulate you for _that_!"

"What?!" Theo yells. He's a little shrill, and he can't even bring himself to care. "What the fuck?" He knows that Billy's been up for a long time too, he's had his own draft to deal with, and he knows that Billy's draft was not as fun as his. Billy can't go out and pick whatever players he wants, not with the payroll of the A's. He knows this, and fuck Billy, seriously, like that makes the Red Sox draft a walk in the fucking park.

"We talked about those guys," Billy says, his voice low and somewhere between hurt and poisonous. "We talked about those guys and you went and drafted them anyways."

"Oh my _god_ , Billy. Are you serious? I'm the general manager of the defending World Series Champions, I am trying to build this team into something that will win _more_ World Series Championships, maybe before _another_ 86 years goes by. _I get the best players I can_. That's what I _do_ , that's my fucking _job_ , that's _your_ job, what the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Oh, so your job is more important?"

"More important than _what_? And _yes_ , Billy, my job is the most important thing here, along with _your_ job."

Silence. When he calms down, he can hear Billy breathing, so he knows he hasn't thrown down the phone or anything, but it's still unnerving. Theo takes a few deep breaths of his own, trying to push back the headache that's starting to creep in around the edges of his consciousness.

"Billy. Did you honestly think I was going to give up _draft picks_ because we're... because we're... I mean, _you_ wouldn't do that." And he feels certain that this is true, that Billy would do lots of crazy-ass things, but would never compromise the A's just because of this thing, whatever it may actually be, with Theo. That would run counter to everything Billy has stood for, lived for, ever since he gave up on playing baseball and started revolutionizing it.

"I don't know," Billy says, so quiet that Theo has to thumb the volume control on his phone up. "You have no idea."

"Jesus fucking Christ." Theo stares at the ceiling, desperately, desperately wanting Billy to be kidding, but Billy wouldn't be kidding, not in that tone of voice, not like that.

He likes Billy. Billy is his friend, maybe even his best friend, these days. He likes talking to Billy on the phone, picking his brain and having his own brain picked in turn, knowing that he can call at any hour of the day or night, knowing that he never has to dumb down his baseball talk. He likes the way Billy swears and sounds like he means it. He likes the soft, meaty sound of Billy chewing on his lip. He likes the way Billy looks at him, seconds before his hands land somewhere unpredictable on Theo's body, like there's nobody else in the entire world worth looking at.

He likes Billy's crazed, ill-advised impulses, something he himself would never be able to do.

But he's the general manager of the Boston Red Sox. Baseball isn't his life, not like it's Billy's life, but he was a GM before this whole Thing with Billy, and he's a GM first. And because baseball _is_ Billy's life, he thinks-- thought-- that it was the same for Billy. It had to be. It just _had_ to be. That was how things _worked_. "Jesus fucking Christ, Billy."

When Billy speaks, the hurt and the poison have gone out of his voice, and he just sounds tired. He just sounds like a guy who spent 15 hours hunched over a speakerphone with the rosters of hundreds of high school and college baseball teams scattered over the table in front of him. "You don't get to swear about Jesus, kid," he says. "Aren't you a Jew?"

Theo bursts out laughing, and then he can't stop, tears leaking out from the corners of his eyes, headache pounding at his temples. After a moment, Billy joins in. They both laugh until they're gasping and then they sink into a companionable silence, just breathing at each other. Theo falls asleep to the sound of Billy softly inhaling, exhaling, and wakes up hours later to a dead cell phone battery.

\----

Billy calls a few days later. Lucchino, who's in the box with Theo, glares at him, but Theo picks up anyways. "What?" he asks, keeping an eye on Greg Maddux. The game is not going well. He wonders how bad it would look for him to run out onto the field and sucker-punch a pitcher 7 years older than him. Would they show that on TV? It would make sensational news, but they never show fans who run onto the field, so maybe he could get away with it.

"You at the game?" Billy asks, cutting back in before Theo can reply. "No, of course you're at the game, historical, Wrigley, curses, spare me. I just wanted to say that Bronson Arroyo is terrible at baseball and I wouldn't give up a draft pick I wanted even if you rolled over and presented your ass to me with a bow on it." Theo makes a series of odd noises, choking back his laughter, and Lucchino gives him another dirty look. "Although you can definitely do that next time I see you in person, if you want. I'd be OK with it."

"You're out of your fucking mind and I'm really glad we had this talk," Theo says, when he can breathe again.

"Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to check in, get a piece of the trainwreck. Only two runs off of Maddux, and one wasn't even earned? Man, that's a shit-can game."

"Don't hafta tell _me_ that. And come on, he's a Hall of Famer. At least David homered. We're not complete embarrassments." Theo sighs dramatically, putting out a hand and leaning on the rail at the front of the box.

"Yeah, but he's liable to do that off of anyone, that barely counts." They watch together as the Cubs catcher grounds out to John Halama, who bobbles the ball but manages to get it to first anyways. Maddux comes up to bat, the helmet sitting awkwardly on his head.

"I kind of hate National League play," Theo admits, watching Halama waggle his eyebrows at Varitek, Maddux waggling his bat between them. "I mean, Wrigley Field, that's OK, but the NL kind of pretty much sucks ass."

Billy rumbles sympathetically. "It's a bitch. Anyone who doesn't like the DH is a cowardly pitcher." Theo makes a harrumphing noise of assent.

Maddux waggles his bat again. Halama throws him a pitch, sort of wobbly and kind of down the middle of the plate, causing Lucchino to make a soft noise of disgust before the ball even gets halfway home. Maddux connects and at first Theo thinks it's going to be a flyball out, because, Greg Maddux! The pitcher! A hundred years old! But the ball keeps on sailing right over the ivy and into the suddenly ecstatic crowd.

Theo slumps down into a seat and covers his eyes. "I hate my life. I hate Chicago. I hate _goats_." The crowd is chanting Greg Maddux's name and someone actually has a poster with a big goat drawn on it, right across from him, it's big enough that he's been able to see it clear across the field all game long. The goat is eating a red sock.

Billy is respectfully awestruck. "Wow. I'm really glad that I got to share this incredible moment of hideous baseball with you. As a general manager, I can only suggest that you feed John Halama into a wood chipper and use him to fertilize the infield, because that's the only way you're going to get any actual production out of him."

"I'm going to let Kevin Millar give him Death Noogies. I'm going to order Millar to give him Super Death Noogies. That's almost as bad as wood-chippering him."

"That's unethical," Lucchino says, voice superimposing over Billy's laughter. Theo looks up in surprise. Lucchino is looking over at him, and he's smiling. Just a little bit, but Theo's spent enough time with him, he can tell.

"Hey," he says into the phone, "I gotta go, OK? I'll talk to you later."

"Yeah yeah, later, go pick up the pieces of your shattered dignity," Billy says, hanging up while he's still laughing, and Theo has to take a moment to marvel at the way it's suddenly never been weird between them. Like that post-draft talk never happened. He wishes he could do whatever Billy does to make it all that easy, but for right now he's not complaining, and it probably involves alcohol anyways.

He looks up at Lucchino again. Lucchino shrugs and looks out over Wrigley, like the net above the ivy-covered wall is suddenly very interesting. "I'm pretty sure it's not ethically sound for a general manager to tell one of his infielders to give one of his relievers a Super Death Noogie."

This is completely unexpected, this friendly civility coming from Lucchino, and Theo doesn't quite know what to make of it. Eventually he looks down at the field, where Varitek has both hands on Halama's shoulders, talking urgently. "Even if he really, really deserves it?"

"Millar will probably do it on his own." Lucchino drops his gaze down to Theo. "I'm glad you're happy," he says, and he looks like he means it, is honestly happy to see Theo happy, which throws Theo for another loop, "but you really shouldn't have your girlfriend thinking it's OK to call you during games."

"That wasn't! That's not... I don't have... what!"

Lucchino snorts a little at whatever expression has landed on Theo's face. "Sure, sure. Of course not. Just tell her not to call during games, OK? We need you alert up here."

"Oh, my god," Theo says, rubbing his hands over his eyes, aware that Lucchino is smiling paternally down at him. "This is probably the worst day of my life in _at least_ a month."

"Ah, youth," Lucchino sighs, small smile aiming back out over the field again, and Theo is unnerved by how much, in that one moment, he sounds just like Billy.

\----

He finds himself wishing, not for the first time, that Billy could just, somehow, be a woman. Fuck, it would make his life so much easier. Nothing to hide, if Billy just had a nice pair of tits... they didn't even have to be particularly nice ones, just so long as they were _there_.

It's not that he _minds_ the phone sex, or the actual touching on the rare times they're together, but he can't keep himself from thinking how much better it would be if Billy was female. If he could just slide into Billy, easy and slick, if only he could let his face sink between Billy's thighs and his tongue could find pussy there. It's not that he _minds_ Billy's cock, but he _really likes pussy_.

He does really like Billy, though, which just complicates the whole thing, because ideal Billy-as-a-woman would still have to have Billy's masculine, mobile voice and Billy's short salt-and-pepper hair. Most of Billy's face, actually, would have to stay intact, and his hands, because Theo really likes his hands, their strength and size and the old baseball calluses that Billy maintains by virtue of the fact that he never actually stopped his workout routine, even when he stopped playing.

The resulting creature is a shapely woman with large breasts, Billy's head and large man-hands, which is not a good look, but if Theo's fantasizing he usually keeps the details sketchy and concentrates on the positive.

And, God, this is so awful, but if Billy was a woman, then he probably wouldn't be in baseball, at least not as a GM, and so there wouldn't be this constant fear that if someone found out they were fucking it would be considered a _conflict of interest_. Theo knows that, as things stand right now, there is no conflict of interest. He's no more or less likely to deal with the A's than he would be otherwise. Maybe he has a slight advantage over other teams because he knows Billy better than most, but that's evened out by the fact that Billy knows him well too. So it's a wash, and totally innocent on a baseball level.

It's not like either one of them, he thinks, is down on the field fighting it out day after day during the season. If they were _players_ , maybe it would seem more like fraternization, something to be avoided to maintain the integrity of the game. But they're not players, and they don't influence the players, not directly anyhow.

Billy would make a fairly ugly woman. Theo thinks that he would end up falling for her anyways.

>  **September 15-18, 2005:** The Oakland A's play in Boston and split the series—6-2, W: Joe Blanton, L: Curt Schilling; 2-3, W: Mike Timlin, L: Juan Cruz; 1-2, W: Bronson Arroyo, L: Dan Haren; 12-3, W: Kirk Saarloos, L: Matt Clement.
> 
>  **October 31, 2005:** Theo Epstein resigns as GM of the Boston Red Sox.

The next time they see each other in person is mid-September, when the A's come to Boston for a 4-game series. The first game is a weird 3 pm afternoon start, something about flight times and official schedulers being unfit to schedule their way out of a paper bag. It throws everyone off a little, but it also means that Theo gets Billy all to himself for the evening, which he's not going to complain about.

Billy won't shut up on the ride to Theo's apartment after the game, though-- "Did you _see_ the way Schilling melted down out there, just completely _lost_ it, that was a beautiful first inning, fuck, I wish they could all go like that,"-- and Theo starts to reconsider the not-complaining-about-getting-Billy-all-to-himself thing.

As soon as he shuts the door Billy gets right up in his space, bracing his arms on either side of Theo's head and shoving Theo against the door with his hips. _Déjà vu_ , Theo thinks, and laughs softly, the laugh hitching a little when Billy's tongue swipes hotly over his jawline.

"Uh," he manages, distracted by the tongue working around to the other side of his jaw. "Not that this isn't nice, Billy, because it is, but I was kinda hoping we could make it to the bed this time."

"Bed? Am I gonna get to fuck you?" The hopefulness on Billy's face is so bright that Theo _almost_ wants to say yes. But not quite. He has a Plan anyways.

Billy has the advantage in position, since he has Theo backed up against the door, but Theo has spent a lot of time thinking very, very sincerely about Billy's behavior and his likes and dislikes, and he's not at all above playing dirty.

He fists a hand in the front of Billy's shirt, not skimping on the amount of material he grabs, pulling all the bagginess out of it. He pushes his hips purposefully back against Billy, and tries to look a little angry. "No. _I_ am gonna fuck _you_." Billy stares at him, the corner of his mouth going slightly slack. "And you're going to like it," Theo adds. Just for good measure.

"Uh," Billy manages, and that's all Theo needs to break away, duck under his arm, pulling Billy through his apartment and into the bedroom by the front of his shirt. He sort of drag-throws Billy onto the bed, where Billy's arms and legs sprawl in a deeply satisfying way. Also, he's no longer talking about how badly Schilling pitched today, which is a definite improvement.

Theo hooks his thumbs into his belt loops, standing at the foot of the bed and glaring down at Billy. He draws himself up to his full height and tries his level best to be firm. Chin up, shoulders back, looking down his nose at Billy. "Strip."

Billy doesn't even argue, just stares at Theo in a dazed kind of way, dopey but somehow still sharkish, smile crawling slowly but surely over his face. He pulls off his own shirt, rucking up his hair with static, hands moving down to undo his belt with no hesitation at all. He undoes his fly, pushes his pants off his hips, wriggles them off his feet, and doesn't take his eyes off of Theo the whole time.

Which is perfect, and entirely the point of the Plan. Billy likes Theo angry, riled up, and Theo had matched that with Billy's obvious and persistent control issues, and taken a chance that maybe Billy would react well to Theo taking charge. The whole 'people who are always in charge out of bed sometimes like to give up control in bed' theory of hot GM sex and all that. There had, naturally, always been the chance that Billy would take it _really, really badly_ , but so far so good.

Billy is in nice shape, all that obsessive working out clearly having an effect. His chest is more defined than Theo's, not hugely muscled but enough so that Theo can see the shape of his pectorals under pale skin. At the center of all that skin is a patch of graying hair that Theo absolutely does not want to run his fingers through. His fingers twitch anyways.

The next part of the Plan involves stripping quickly and ripping Billy's boxers off in one smooth move, to establish dominance. The ripping ends up more like frantic tugging, because Billy is already mostly hard in there, and his cock gets in the way of getting the boxers off cleanly, and really, trust Billy to create that kind of ridiculous problem.

Theo takes a minute to lie on top of Billy (finally!) and just kind of rub up against him. Billy pets Theo's back over and over again, like he can't quite believe the expanse of skin under his palms. After a bit his hips start to twitch, so Theo shifts sideways a little and lets Billy hump his thigh until Billy is rock hard and leaking.

"I'm gonna fuck you now," Theo says, and although his voice isn't as authoritative as he could have hoped, it's at least rough and not squeaky and only shaking a little bit. "OK?"

"Yeah yeah," Billy drawls, "how many times do I gotta tell you?" Billy has told Theo many, many times by now about his experiences bottoming, in the service of convincing Theo that it's not so bad and he should totally try it out. Also in the service of phone sex, some of which had been so mind-wrenchingly hot that Theo was actually embarrassed for his own phone.

"Yeah. OK. I need you to..." Theo tugs at Billy's hip, lifting himself shakily to give Billy room to turn over onto his stomach.

Despite all of Billy's assurances, he's tight around Theo's finger, tight enough for Theo to find himself wondering if all of Billy's talk wasn't just some sort of misplaced gay ballplayer bravado. Theo's familiar enough with Billy to realize that to ask him about it would be to insinuate that he's weak-- or, at least, that's how Billy would take it. He figures that if Billy's really in pain, or seriously doesn't like something that's happening here, he'll turn around and punch Theo in the face. Somehow this is a comforting thought. The Billy Beane failsafe.

Slowly, gradually the pressure around his finger eases, enough that he can add another. He pets Billy's lower back to give him some distracting sensation and works steadily. Women share this anatomy; this at least is not unfamiliar to him. It's just ass, it's just Billy, and he's used to both.

His hand starts to cramp up and his fingers curl a little, involuntarily, but the arch in Billy's back at that seems equally involuntary. Making Billy react against his will is worth a little pain.

"Are you gonna fuck me, or are you just gonna play with me until I die?" Billy asks, his voice muffled in the sheets and curiously strangled, and making Billy sound like that is worth _a lot_ of pain.

Theo takes his time sliding on a condom, glad that Billy is facedown in the bed, can't see his hands shaking. He presses in with a thumb, just to make sure Billy's still relaxed and open, and then he's there, he's pushing into Billy and, facedown or not, Billy has to be able to feel him shaking now, but for once Billy doesn't do anything except sigh and groan and spread his legs a little more.

It eventually becomes obvious that Billy _wasn't_ lying about having done this before, because while Theo is sweating and thrusting and shivering with the knowledge that he's _fucking a guy, in the ass, right now_ , Billy just gets more and more vocal, alternately calling Theo a sonofabitch and begging him to go harder, faster. Which, yeah, OK, Theo can handle that.

The faster he moves his hips, the hotter Billy's ass seems to get, although he can't tell if it's his own mind playing tricks on him or if it's actual friction. He sincerely hopes it's the former. He's about to ask Billy if he's OK when he notices that Billy is pushing, as if to get away from his cock. He immediately eases up, concerned, but Billy makes a frustrated noise and Theo realizes that he's trying to hump the bed.

"Woah," he says, wrapping an arm around Billy's chest to hold him up a little, that rough patch of hair rubbing on the inside of his forearm, "woah, woah, it's OK, I got you." His other arm curls around Billy's hip, his hand wrapping around Billy's cock.

"Ohgod," Billy says. Theo squeezes once and draws his hand slowly up Billy's cock, all the way from the root to the tip, pushing into Billy's ass at the same time. "Theo," Billy says, "uhh," and then he tightens his fists in the sheets and pushes his ass up at Theo and shoves his face into the bed and says something else that sounds like... sounds like...

And Theo has no time to work out what it sounds like Billy is saying, because Billy's ass is clenching around his cock, surrounding him with heat and pressure and Theo's hips are stuttering. He presses his mouth to the center of Billy's back, gasping in the sweat and salt of him there, his own blood roaring in his ears, and he can't hear anything else at all.

\----

The next game perversely, inexplicably also starts at 3 pm. It ends 10 innings and almost 5 hours later, and Theo isn't surprised when he runs into Billy outside the team clubhouses after the game. Billy has two assistants with him and is bitching fluently about the length of the game (intolerable), Boston air quality (irritating), David Ortiz's parentage (clearly irresponsible), and something Theo can't quite catch about Terry Francona, although he's sure it's along the same lines.

"Billy," Theo says, grinning quick and smug. Victoriously.

"I really hate this city, you know that?" Billy says, but at the same time he's waving his assistants into the visitor's clubhouse and falling into step with Theo. "Where are we going?"

"Nowhere. I was just going to find you to see if Wakefield's 9-inning masterpiece had blown out your brain or not."

"He's old and his main pitch is pathetic and his out-pitch is pathetic and his personal catcher is pathetic _and_ his goatee sucks," Billy finishes, a bit meanly, Theo thinks.

"Nine innings. Two runs allowed and, oh, you lost." Theo aims another sidelong grin at Billy. "How many pitchers did you use today? I think I lost count after Calero."

Billy huffs and runs a hand through his hair. Theo notices that his hair's already fairly disheveled, like he spent most of the game pulling on it in frustration. "I want to know where and how you got David Ortiz and I want to know why _I_ don't have him. Obviously this is a big fucking mistake on the part of the universe."

"Minnesota, because they're idiots, and I'm sure you've committed some awful sin or other that this is paying you back for."

" _Hate_ this city," Billy mutters, surprising Theo by grabbing his belt and pulling him into a darkened and empty conference room off the main hall. "Makes me start to hate my stupid fucking team." He closes the door by shoving Theo against it, blocking out the little light that was illuminating the space. "You've got all these nice shiny _toys_..." Theo feels hot breath on his throat a second before he feels the scratch of Billy's early evening stubble, and a second after that he's feeling a tongue swiping at a tendon in his neck. "I'll bet you don't even worry about what they cost, do you? Just think, 'I want _that_ one', and someone signs the check and they get delivered to your fucking doorstep, huh?"

"No. Uh. Billy." Billy is sucking on his neck, moving his mouth around so he's not in any one place long enough to make a hickey. Theo really, really just wants to let him do what he wants, so long as what he wants to do involves setting half of Theo's nerve endings on fire, but there's something nagging at the back of his mind.

Billy drops to his knees and is undoing Theo's belt when voices go by on the other side of the door. Theo can just barely make them out, but they're easy to identify, voices he knows as well as a mother knows the voices of her children: Kevin Millar and Manny Ramirez, teasing each other about their respective hair styles, loud and carefree and like they hadn't just played a 5 hour ballgame. "Dreads are in, man," Manny says, very earnestly.

"If you'd just let me bleach _some_ of 'em," Millar says, that ridiculous pseudo-twang overlaid with honest longing to bleach Manny's hair, "we could totally match..."

Their voices fade out as they continue down the hallway, but, yeah. That's his team. His team, which plays here, in this building. Right, Theo remembers. He cups his hands around Billy's face and gently pulls him back. "Billy. Bad idea. Ballpark. _Bad idea_."

"You know how I get these impulses," Billy mutters. He puts a hand on the front of Theo's pants and, damn him to hell, squeezes. "Terrible, terrible impulses. Possibly a kink about doing you in your own ballpark. And I don't think you want me doing this to you in the dugout..."

That image-- Theo sitting on the dugout bench with Billy kneeling in front of him among all the discarded Gatorade cups and bits of broken bat, looking out at the field and the Green Monster while Billy sucked him off-- distracts Theo long enough for Billy to be able to _actually_ start sucking him off. "God, no, Billy," Theo says, what if _Lucchino_ walked in, and that gives him the strength he needs to grab Billy's hair and pull him up hard.

"Ow, fucking hell, what the fuck do you think you're _doing_?" Billy gets his feet under himself and stands, rubbing the top of his head and looking infuriated. The effect should be ruined by the fact that his lips are spit-wet and reddened and his hair is sticking up all over the place, but it just makes him look even crazier and angrier.

"We are not doing this in my _ballpark_ ," Theo hisses. "I work here. Everyone that I work with, works here. My _employers_ work here. My _players_ work here."

"You are the only guy I know who would actually turn down a perfectly good blowjob," Billy hisses right back, getting up in Theo's face again, but thankfully keeping his hands to himself.

Theo eases himself back inside his pants and tucks his shirt back in, does his belt back up, all inches away from Billy's hands. He glares. No means no, and he's not going to back down, not from this one. Of course he wants the blowjob, he's _male_ and he has a _penis_ , but he will not compromise his team. And he has never, _never_ shied away from saying no. Not when it was the right thing to do, not when push really came to shove.

Billy, he thinks, should know that by now. Billy should have known it the second he heard that the Red Sox were trading Nomar.

"Impossible fucking kid," Billy hisses, and this is the first time he's ever said it without an ounce of warmth in the words. Theo feels something very like a shiver deep in his guts, this close and Billy could be breaking bones easily, but he doesn't move once he finishes putting himself back together, except to lift his chin a little so that he can glare at Billy more effectively.

Billy's hand comes back, balling into a fist. Theo tenses himself, holds his breath, but when the punch comes forward it lands on the wall right next to his head, just off the door jamb. It sounds explosively loud and he can feel his eyes widening involuntarily. Billy swears once and pulls the door open violently, throwing Theo off balance and out of the way.

He recovers by grabbing the nearest chair, just barely managing to keep himself from falling over. When he turns around, Billy is gone, and all that's left to show that anything had happened in the room is a set of fine, spidery cracks in the wall, radiating out from a single point just next to the door.

\----

Bronson Arroyo barely beats out Dan Haren in the third game, and Matt Clement completely melts down in the fourth. Kirk Saarloos isn't any great shakes on the Athletic's end, but anything is better than 7 runs in under 2 innings, so the A's leave town with a split series.

Theo has things to do, people to see, a flight to Tampa Bay to worry about. One of his reserve outfielders, Jay Payton, will not stop complaining about playing time, and needs to be traded before one of the other players takes mercy on everyone and kills him in the night. The PR people have been after Theo again about one last late season promotional push, because the schedulers in their infinite wisdom have them set to end the season with yet _another_ series against New York, just for shits and giggles.

He has started to suspect that someone in the scheduling company actually, truly hates him. Maybe an ex-girlfriend is running the company? A kid he rejected from the _Yale Daily News_ sports writing staff? An Orioles fan? Maybe it's just a psychotic with a really sick sense of humor.

In any event, he doesn't exactly have the motivation or the time to seek Billy out again, and Billy doesn't come looking for him.

\----

It's almost the end of the season and it doesn't look like they're going to make it very far in the playoffs, not this year. That's OK. The front office is still glowing over the draft, and Theo's fairly confident that they'll make the playoffs next year, the year after that for sure. A year or two of rebuilding after a World Series championship is very acceptable, and is well within his plans for the team. Six stacked levels of minor league teams, 162 games in a season, decades of history stretching back-- long-term is the way to think around here.

He almost doesn't hear the assistant trying to get his attention as he heads into his office. The assistant is a young woman, a middle-of-the-season hire, and she's running down the hall shouting, "Sir! Sir!" Theo assumes she's trying to catch up to Henry or Lucchino and is completely surprised when she stops at his door. Sometimes he still can't quite believe that he's a 'sir' kind of person.

She hands him a jumpdrive and immediately turns bright red, all the way from the tips of her ears down to the collar of her shirt. Theo stares, then looks down at the 'drive. It's an innocuous stick of black plastic, like every other jumpdrive he's seen around the office, and definitely not something that should make anyone blush.

"The report you asked for," she says, looking at the floor, ears still burning. "Sir. About, about Mr. Beane and Eric Chavez."

"Oh, right." Theo had pretty much forgotten about that, the Catalog request submitted months before. He slots the 'drive into his computer and waits for its icon to show up on his desktop. He glances at the assistant, who still won't quite look at him. "I'm guessing it's more interesting than the owners telling him he has to sign Chavez?"

The assistant makes a kind of strangled gulping noise. "A. A bit."

Information unfolds on the screen; text, pictures. Theo starts clicking around, then stops. There's a photo of Billy and Chavez in infrared black-and-white, not perfectly in focus but unmistakable, standing in a parking lot, screaming at each other. There's another picture next to it, nearly identical, like the camera didn't move, but in this one Billy has both hands buried in Chavez's hair. Chavez has his arms wrapped so tightly around Billy's body that Theo can't see where they start and end. Their faces are mashed into one ghostly white infrared shape.

Theo leans back in his seat and looks up at the assistant, whose name he absolutely cannot remember right now. He doesn't bother to hide the shock on his face. "How long?" he asks, although he feels like he already knows the answer.

"We think since. Since right before he got that contract." The assistant tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and, despite the persistent blush, strives for some semblance of professionalism. "So. Since, we think, sometime in 2003."

"Wow. That's."

"Really, really unethical, I know." The assistant nods, then glances up. "I know you're... I know you guys are friends, or. Well. He's better friends with you than he is with most people. He never... he never said?"

"Hell no." Theo exhales and rubs his thumb over the edge of his jaw. He's got several days of beard growth there, something he just can't be bothered with this time of year. The stubble prickles under his thumb sharply. "No. God. He never said anything."

"I wouldn't take it personally, sir, not with the way baseball is," and oh god, the assistant actually thinks Theo will be offended because Billy's his friend and Billy didn't tell him about this. Of course Theo _is_ offended, or something in the general region of offended but several orders of magnitude worse, but not for the reasons she obviously thinks. She smiles at him reassuringly, and Theo has to look back at the screen, because he doesn't know what his face is doing right now, only knows that she doesn't need to see it.

"When. Uh. Did it end?"

"End?" The assistant blinks politely. "Oh, no sir, sorry if that wasn't clear. We don't think it has." She smiles, blush hitching itself firmly back up her ears, although it had only barely begun to recede. "I know it's... not OK, I mean, GM, player, but, well, if you ask me, the fact that they managed to stay together for 2 years and counting, it's just so..."

"So?"

"So _sweet_."

Theo nods, barely aware, hardly knowing what he's doing, clicking his mouse aimlessly. There are more photos, some infrared, some color, in varying amounts of focus and obscurity, but always Billy's unambiguous outline and the thick pure black shock of Chavez's hair. He doesn't ask where they came from. Disgruntled clubhouse employees or discarded team photographer shots that didn't get deleted properly; his people can find him anything if it's there to be found.

Windows open one after the other on his screen and he catches glimpses: a hand on a baseball-pant-clad hip, knees pressed together, shadows behind windows. Billy's eyes crinkled at the corners, his head just a little too close to Chavez's, fingers linked under the table.

Theo closes his eyes briefly, and a photo all his own pops up, Boston streetlights washing Billy's face pale white, his lips quirking into a tired smile, hair messed up on the side where he was leaning on the car window on their way back from the airport. The casual slope of his shoulders, the angle of his neck as he looks up at the Boston night sky. His hand, suspended, palm up and fingers open, waiting for a luggage strap. The dark bruise resting like a classical arch across the top of his cheekbone.

There are little dates in the filenames at the tops of the windows, the most recent from two weeks ago.

End?

Of course not.

\----

The divisional series is agony, they don't have anything against the White Sox, and that's it. The White Sox haven't won it all since 1917. It's someone else's year to break free.

\----

The fight with Lucchino, when it comes, is like a relief. They've been angling towards it all year, small petty arguments getting bigger and louder and harder to overlook, and shortly after the season ends it explodes full-bore, right in the middle of a post-everything front office meeting. Werner doesn't even pretend he can ignore it this time and actually bolts from the room when Lucchino throws a binder at the wall.

"What the hell happened to you?" Lucchino screams. "I taught you everything you know and you act like I never did a fucking thing for you!"

"I didn't sign on here to be your fucking bootlick!" Theo screams right back, giving as good as he's getting. They're both standing now on opposite sides of the table, assistants in chairs pushed all the way back to the walls, Henry standing at the head of the table, eyes whipping from one to the other. Papers are still raining from the air, the binder broken and exploded on the floor.

"You were never like this in San Diego--"

"Neither were you, you used to treat me like I had a _brain_ \--"

"You used to respect the chain of command--"

"This is _baseball_ , not the motherfucking _Army_ , chain of fucking command, what the hell do you think this _is_ \--"

"You won't listen to anyone, nobody but you you YOU--"

"Nobody knows what the fuck they're _doing_ , why the fuck should I listen to people who are _raging fucking idiots_ \--"

"The only raging fucking idiot here is _you_ \--"

"You don't even know what the fuck you're talking about, you don't know a fucking thing about this team, you just want to micro-fucking-manage me to death because you can't operate any other way--"

"Pigheaded, arrogant, pissant fucking kid--"

"Back the fuck off my team or I swear I'll--"

"You know what you sound like, won't listen to anyone but yourself, you sound _exactly_ like that asshole Billy Beane--"

"I swear to fucking god Lucchino--"

"--sound just like him, aren't you friends with him? Guess you think he taught you everything now, huh, did he give you your first big league job now too?--"

"I won't listen to this shit _Larry_ , I'll fucking walk out--"

"--like you're the only person in the universe, sound _exactly_ like him--"

"--I'm warning you--"

"--megalomaniac, reason why that fucker won't ever get hired anywhere else--"

"--I'll leave, I'll--"

"-- _exactly_ like him--"

"--fucking _quit_ \--"

"Theo," Henry says, calm voice cutting through everything like a knife. Theo and Lucchino both look over at him, panting, stricken. "Don't do this."

"I _can't_ do this," Theo says, and the moment he says it, he realizes that it's true.

\----

In the front seat of his car Theo drops his head into his hands, letting the top rim of the steering wheel stop his forehead's descent, leather seam imprinting there. He digs his fingers into his hair and pulls. "Not him. Not him, not him, _not him_ ," he's not turning into Billy. He's not Billy. He's not going to let this happen.

He's pissed off at Lucchino, who _has_ been micromanaging more and more lately, and Theo is _pretty_ sure that he's also been passing information to certain local newspaper writers, information that makes Theo look bad. In San Diego they had had a good working relationship, he and Lucchino, a kind of relaxed mentor/student vibe, but maybe it was the relaxed nature of San Diego that made that possible. It hasn't been like that, not much, in Boston. Lucchino does have to learn that Theo can't be pushed around. He really can't work with the man otherwise. Not anymore.

Lucchino's words are still ringing in his ears, jangling around inside his head like so much loose change. He _has_ changed since Yale, since San Diego. Of course he has; years and years have passed and he was much younger when he started out than most guys are, in this line of business. Most guys get their growing up done before they're put in charge of baseball teams. Theo's had to do his growing up with the team in his hands.

 _Exactly like him_ , the Lucchino in his head spits. No. He's not. But he is changing, in addition to growing up, and here in the car he can sift through, look back, really see. That shit with the Catalog, using team resources to do a background check on Billy-- he never would have done that two years ago, not even if it was nominally baseball-related. Giving a general manager, _any_ general manager preferential treatment at the Winter Meetings, he never would have _dreamed_ that two years ago... and did he, this last one? He didn't make any trades with Billy, but he gave Billy far more of his time than he gave to anyone else.

He can't remember the last time he played tapeball with his front office. This was supposed to be a victory year, a year to sit back and savor what they'd done just a little. The first year in a long, long time where the pressure was more off than it was on. It should have been the year of front office parties and midnight tapeball games, but it wasn't, and whose fault was that?

He's changing, and he doesn't really like where he's headed.

He starts the car and thinks of Billy, driving around Oakland with alcohol on his breath and his cell phone trapped between his ear and his shoulder, too scared to watch his team play, too proud to let anyone else run them. He won't let himself go that way.

The Citgo sign crests into view, its red triangle heaving up above the low Fenway-neighborhood skyline. Theo stops at a red light and looks up at it. Neon tubing turns in sharp corners he's known since his father first brought him to a Red Sox game, pointed up, pretty lights inside the ballpark and out. He can always find Fenway if he can see the Citgo sign, even if every other part of the street he's on is unfamiliar to him.

Theo might not know everything. But he knows when to say no. When to say _enough_. Deep down, he's always known how to do that, and Billy never has.

>  **January 24, 2006:** Theo Epstein is rehired as GM and Executive Vice President of the Boston Red Sox.
> 
>  **December 29, 2006:** The San Francisco Giants sign free agent Barry Zito, following his unconditional release from the Oakland A's.

>  **January 1, 2007:** Theo Epstein marries Marie Whitney.
> 
>  **October 28, 2007:** The Boston Red Sox win their second World Series in 4 seasons.
> 
>  **December 12, 2007:** Jack, Theo Epstein's first child, is born.


End file.
